UC San Diego computer scientist turns his face into a remote control

New work at nexus of facial expression recognition research and automated tutoring

A UC San Diego computer science Ph.D. student can turn his face into a remote control that speeds and slows video playback. The proof-of-concept demonstration is part of a larger... Click here for more information.

A computer science Ph.D. student can turn his face into a remote control that speeds and slows video playback. The proof-of-concept demonstration is part of a larger project to use automated facial expression recognition to make robots more effective teachers.

Jacob Whitehill, a computer science Ph.D. student from UC San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering, is leading this project. It builds on technology for detecting facial expressions being developed at UC San Diego's Machine Perception Laboratory (MPLab), part of the Institute for Neural Computation, and housed in the UCSD Division of Calit2.

Watch Jacob Whitehill turn his face into a remote control in a three minute video at: http://video-jsoe.ucsd.edu/asx/Whitehill_UC_San_Diego.wmv.asx

A UC San Diego computer science Ph.D. student can turn his face into a remote control that speeds and slows video playback. The proof-of-concept demonstration is part of a larger... Click here for more information.

In a recent pilot study, Whitehill and colleagues demonstrated that information within the facial expressions people make while watching recorded video lectures can be used to predict a person's preferred viewing speed of the video and how difficult a person perceives the lecture at each moment in time.