Alex from The Temple of Ao Fei
Qubits | Official account QbitAI
Imagine this:
You are ostensibly staring intently at the online lesson on the computer screen, when suddenly, the computer reports to the teacher: this person is actually wandering!
Obviously looking at the screen, how can the computer still find your "little secret"?
It turns out that this is a facial expression analysis technology developed by Intel to detect how you feel during online classes.
However, intel's Emotion AI was put on the online course platform, which immediately caused a lot of controversy.
This emotion detection AI was used in an app called Class, developed based on Zoom.
Michael Chasen, CEO of Class R&D, believes that teachers have difficulty in reaching out to students in an online virtual classroom environment, and the product helps teachers identify when students need help.
However, some netizens do not buy this:
This project is not scientific, is there no one in the whole Intel company whose facial expressions and emotional states are inconsistent?
Some netizens believe that humans can recognize the facial expressions of others, and the principle of Emotion AI is a pseudoscience.
Another data analyst is adamant about this application, Say No.
So, how is the level of this AI monitoring better than the director of the Teaching Office? How?
Can emotional AI in the classroom help teaching?
Let's take a look at what kind of system The Classroom Image AI is.
In the process of developing this Emotion AI system, Intel first used the 3D camera that comes with the computer to record the students' expressions when listening to lectures in the offline class.
Psychologists are then hired to watch the students' videos and classify the emotions they detect to label the underlying data used to train the algorithmic model.
Finally, an Emotion AI model is trained with this data, which is used to "secretly observe" the status of students in online classes.
Intel believes the system can detect whether students are bored, distracted, or confused by assessing their facial expressions and how they interact with educational content.
Emotion detection AI outside the classroom
On the one hand, previous studies have shown that because people express themselves through dozens or hundreds of subtle and complex facial expressions, body gestures, or physiological signals, it is not appropriate to classify their status with a single tag.
On the other hand, if you want to use Intel's Animation AI to capture students' facial expressions, you have to turn on the camera.
Online classes and online meetings have become popular in recent years, and whether students need to turn on their cameras to attend classes has also caused controversy.
Some students worry that turning on the camera will make their residence public, which is a violation of personal privacy.
As for communicating with the teacher, it can also be done through a microphone or chat box.
In addition, this technology also has certain requirements for network speed, and if students take classes outdoors, it will be more traffic-consuming.
Analyst Nandita Sampath believes that Intel's technology could be used by teachers to judge or punish students, even if it is not their intention.
Emotion detection AI outside the classroom
In fact, Emotion AI is also impacting a number of everyday areas, including gaming, virtual sales, and customer service software.
For example, in medical diagnosis, emotion detection AI software can help doctors diagnose diseases through speech analysis, such as judging whether a patient has depression and dementia.
There are similar examples in car safety.
Previously, Huawei has launched an APP called Facing Emotions, which can effectively help blind and visually impaired people with mobile phones.
Facing Emotions can use the rear camera to scan a person's face and identify the eyes, nose, eyebrows, and mouth, as well as the location between them, and use AI algorithms to determine the expression of the conversation partner in real time.
The software converts 7 human emotions (anger, fear, disgust, happiness, sadness, surprise and contempt) into 7 tones, allowing blind and visually impaired people to communicate with people more freely.
What do you think about the prospect of productization of ai technology for emotion detection?