A new NSF award from the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems brings together an interdisciplinary team of investigators from UC Riverside, Distinguished Professor Bir Bhanu (PI) from Electrical and Computer Engineering and Professor Aaron Seitz (Co-PI) from Psychology to address key challenges associated with spontaneous microexpression recognition in non-social scenarios. It develops a transformative approach to the understanding of complex and subtle facial microexpressions and bio-feedback where the synergy between cyber and human systems can be fully exploited. The project concentrates on generating bio-feedback from humans while learning skills, such as game playing and online learning, and being recorded and analyzed in continuous color and depth video streams. It will develop computer algorithms for human-machine synergy and test how this information can provide for superior learning when training applications are augmented with expression-informed bio-feedback in near real-time. This represents a significant step forward in training machines to recognize and classify facial microexpressions and maximize the synergy of cyber-human systems that will improve the quality of life experiences. It will provide a computing environment within the reach of common people in which the interests or even the health of people can be detected and predicted, with significant impacts on skill learning, education and information retrieval.

Link to Award: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1911197&HistoricalAwards=false