A few weeks ago the news that the Californian startup Emotient is working on the development of a software for Google Glass that allows you to interpret facial expressions. The research of a team of neuroscientists, cognitivists and computer engineers at the University of Ohio is also moving in the same direction. In fact, the team discovered a way to make a computer recognize 21 distinct facial expressions, related to simple emotions or even to complex aggregates of multiple emotions. The outcome of the research, described in the latest issue of «Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences», has been hailed as a true turning point in the field of cognitive analysis. Until now, in fact, we had limited ourselves to working on six basic emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust, while now the number of emotions that can be decoded by a machine has increased by more than three times. “We've gone way beyond reading facial expressions for simple emotions like 'I'm happy' or 'I'm sad.' We found strong congruence in how people move their facial muscles in expressing 21 categories of emotion,” said Aleix Martinez, professor of computer engineering at Ohio University. "Our work" he further observed "tells us that these 21 expressions are manifested in almost the same way by each individual, at least in our culture". The researchers first collected photographs of the expressions of 230 volunteers subjected to different verbal stimuli, then proceeded to a scrupulous examination of the resulting 5 images, focusing attention on the variations of fundamental indicators of expression such as the corners of the mouth or the margin outside of the eyebrows. The data were then processed using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), a system for coding facial expressions developed in 1978 by two US university professors. Therefore, once the expressions of simple emotions had been identified with certainty, such as, for example, "happiness" or "surprise", we then moved on to determining the complex ones that arose, such as "happily surprised", from a combination of the first two.
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