Social Engineering Blogs

An Aggregator for Blogs About Social Engineering and Related Fields

Are You Being Judged On Your Smile?

Are you being judged on your smile?  According to Atlantic.com we could judge people especially our elected representatives on their smiles.

How would one go about judging smiles?  New facial expression recognition technology is paving the way to do just that.

Developer and journalist Dan Nguyen has taken advantage of recent facial expression recognition technology such as Face.com’s facial detection algorithm, the New York Times’ Congress API, and Sunlight Labs’ Congress API to amass images of senators in an effort to organize them according to “Face Coordinates” and then determine via those coordinates the relative smiliness of each senator’s photo.

What exactly that smiliness reveals about a person’s character is up for debate.  Feel free to draw your own conclusions.

In a nut shell these programs measure proportionality of the shapes of eyes, noses, and mouths.

The project, according to Nguyen, is not really intended to help the average Joe reach a decision in regards to electing a government official, but is a teaching tool.  A fun way of explaining and experimenting with programming language.

Be sure to click on the link to the original article to see various images of senator’s smiles!

Emotional Android Companions

Robot companions can now express nine different emotional states.

This new android, reported on by Wall Street Daily, is designed to be a resourceful human companion equipped with an animated neck, three discs and a set of eyes.

Check out the link to the original article to view a photo of this new Anthropomorphism machine.

Polish designers are the brains behind this new devise coined  Emotive Heady System or EMYS.  Chief robot designer Professor Krzysztof Tchon comments on their creation,

“the robot is meant to accompany humans in their domestic environment or at offices…so it has to perform some functions useful for humans.  That’s why the robot is able to express emotions to a certain degree and also read human emotions and react accordingly.”

The researchers hope their robot will pave the way towards natural  and unselfconscious human-robot interactions.

Fetal Facial Expression Research Update

In December Humintell blogged on new research, which posited that facial expressions begin in utero.  The article entitled “Baby Face” delineated that several facial movements begin in the second trimester and enable the formation of all the elements of laughter by the 30th week of pregnancy.

This suggests that the smile is not a reflexive response mimicking a human behavior but rather an independent action.

The National Right to Life News Today has just released additional photos of facial expressions in the womb.  These photos are extremely interesting as they highlight that smiles and perhaps laughter occur even early than thought at around 24 weeks.

Peter Tallack affirms in In the Womb for National Geographic that, “Whatever the fetus is feeling, at 20 weeks she is certainly capable of demonstrating lots of facial expressions. 4D scans have revealed babies not only grimacing but also seeming to smile and even laugh.”