Am I Boring You?

Many people whom others find boring are utterly clueless. They can literally go their whole lives wondering why others shut them out.

This is especially true for those suffering from autism, a condition that renders one unable to discern ordinary cues of emotional response.

Now, MIT Technology Review reports that technology is racing to help people with this social disorder. A new device has been developed that is, in effect, an emotion detector.

This device will alert an autistic user if someone they are talking to begins to get bored or annoyed.

Dr. Rana El Kaliouby of MIT’s Media Lab calls it an “emotional social intelligence prosthetic” device. The system consists of a tiny camera attached to a pair of glasses, a hand-held computer, image recognition software and special software that interprets emotions. When the listener seems bored or annoyed, the computer will vibrate.

The software is able to assess whether someone is in agreement with what’s being said, paying attention, considering the matter, or even uncertain — all from a mere several seconds of video.

Other software can properly detect the basic emotions of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise and disgust. However, the complex states Dr. El Kaliouby’s program focuses on are trickier to identify. They are expressed in a sequence of movements rather than just a single expression.          

A machine-learning algorithm is at the core of the software. It generalizes from video clips of actors demonstrating specific emotions. So far, the software is right 90 percent of the time when assessing actors but just 64 percent of the time with regular people.

El Kaliouby is now training the software on excerpts from movies and footage captured by webcams. This week she plans to gather the first on-the-move training footage by equipping a group of volunteers, some of whom are autistic, with wearable cameras.

Raising the accuracy of recognition is crucial. Additionally, the system requires a high-resolution digital camera that’s small enough and light enough to be worn comfortably. It is also a computing-intensive, so proper real-time applications may require a few more doublings of computer power. All of these challenges should be met in the next five years.

The team will present the device next week at the Body Sensor Network conference at MIT. People with autism are not the only ones who stand to benefit. Timothy Bickmore of Northeastern University in Boston, who studies ways in which computers can be made to engage with people’s emotions, says the device would be a great teaching aid. “I would love it if you could have a computer looking at each student in the room to tell me when 20 percent of them were bored or confused,” he explained.

There is preliminary evidence that women are better at distinguishing emotions than men. In a study of children, girls displayed greater sensitivity to emotions than boys.

Call it a hunch, but I predict that when this technology is perfected, the biggest market will be husbands wanting to better understand their wives…or wives wanting to help their husbands.

Now let’s consider for a moment a field so new that I must coin a name for it…

Some Social Implications of Nano-Genetic Engineering

Genetic engineering and related fields have been moving forward at a rapid pace since the 1980s. Nanotechnology is just getting started. Apart from its enormous significance in its own right, nanotechnology is equally amazing as an enabling technology. Consider the case of genetic engineering.

Crucial to understanding any organism is a complete breakdown of its structure. While recent developments in DNA sequencing have accelerated this work, much remains to be done. Nanotech will take this to its full potential.

Tiny robots, themselves comprised of a mere handful of molecules, will move painstakingly through any microbiological structure, such as a cell nucleus. They will disassemble it atom by atom, recording what they discover for future use.

Once this has been completed enough times to eliminate any errors or anomalies, scientists and engineers will then have a “blueprint” for that particular microbiological structure. It could be a virus, a type of cell or even a component of a cell.

Subsequently, other nanobots will be able to reassemble the microorganism from its “blueprint,” much as one would do this by following architectural drawings. Not only will they be able to do this, but they will be able to alter and substitute substructures on demand. (Remember, in architecture and manufacturing, the ultimate structure is itself comprised of levels of substructures, each of which has its own blueprint.)

Currently, genetic engineers are fairly adept at cutting and pasting genes from one organism to another. They can even do this between species. What they can’t yet do with any efficiency is modify an existing gene in a precise way upon demand and test that gene right away for its expression.

Nanotech will enable this kind of real-time analysis, which will allow organisms to be crafted in much the same way software is written today. I’m calling it, “Nano-genetic engineering” (unless someone else has previously named it, in which case I’ll cheerfully cede the evanescent rights of naming).

While one can easily envision Frankensteinian scenarios, the uses are, in fact, far more likely to be benign. I predict that by 2014, when the World Health Organization discovers a new viral plague such as SARS, the response won’t be limited to quarantine, but will include immediate development of organisms that provide immunity or cure the disease, without harmful side effects.

Every radical technological development brings both great promise and perils. Yet the solution proffered by noted computer scientist Bill Joy — that humanity forego certain areas of exploration and development because they appear too risky — is greatly mistaken.

Apart from foregoing the potential benefits (imagine if compatriots had prevailed upon Benjamin Franklin to forego his experiments with lightning), such a decision relegates all such research to the backwaters, and the kind of hidden labs populated by terrorists and dictators’ minions.

Thanks, but I’ll take my science out in the open, with a healthy dose of peer review and public awareness. Just as new technologies rush to emerge, so too will ever more advanced systems of protection. Consider, for example, the advent of computer viruses and anti-virus software.

To your profitable future,

Jonathan Kolber
April 05, 2006

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