News Digest

The Sum of Your Facial Parts

New York Times (10/09/08) Kershaw, Sarah 

Researchers at Tel Aviv University have developed "beautification engine" software that uses a mathematical formula to alter the original form of a person's face in a picture to a theoretically more attractive version.  The program is based on the responses of 68 men and women who viewed pictures of male and female faces and picked the most attractive ones.  Data from the survey was applied to an algorithm involving 234 measurements between facial features, including the distances between lips and chin, the forehead and the eyes, and between the eyes.  The research was published in the August proceedings of ACM's SIGGRAPH.  Studies have shown that there is a surprising amount of agreement over what makes a face attractive.  Symmetry is key, along with youthfulness, clarity or smoothness of skin, and vivid color, such as in the eyes or hair.  Tommer Leyvand, one of the developers of the software and a Microsoft researcher, says the goal was to tackle the challenge of altering a face according to agreed-upon standards of attractiveness while producing a result that left the face completely recognizable.  "This tool shows in the most simple fashion how easy it is to manipulate photographs and make people more attractive," Leyvand says.  "But the difference is so subtle that it just shows how insignificant it is."  Leyvand says the software could have practical applications in advertising, film, and animation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/09/fashion/09skin.html

Turing machine The contest is based on the ideas of British mathematician Alan Turing, who in 1950 argued that conversation was proof of intelligence, and if a computer talked like a human, then for all practical purposes it thought like a human.

Computers That Understand How You Feel University of Twente (10/13/08) Wanders, Rianne A Ph.D. candidate at the University of Twente has developed a dialog system that is capable of interpreting human emotion.  Trung Bui used a mathematical technique developed in the 1960s for controlling factory processes, but took a hybrid approach by combining the Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) with the Dynamic Decision Network (DDN) technique.  POMDP works well with small-scale dialog problems, but DDN-POMDP enables dialog systems to look ahead and determine whether they have enough calculating power to handle larger problems.  Bui used the hybrid strategy in a navigation system for emergency services, and a separate stress module allows it to measure the emotional level of the user during communication.  The navigation system is capable of anticipating that more mistakes are likely to be made when the user has a raised stress level, and will regularly ask the user for confirmation. http://www.utwente.nl/nieuws/pers/en/cont_08-041_en.doc/