maiden_taiwan - Slashdot User

Submission + - Emotion-detection applications are built on outdated science

Submitted by maiden_taiwan on Friday July 19, 2019 @01:13PM

maiden_taiwan writes: Can computers determine your emotional state from your face? A panel of senior scientists with backgrounds in neuroscience, psychology, computer science, electrical engineering, biology, anthropology, psychiatry, pediatrics, and public affairs spent two years reviewing over 1000 research papers on the topic. Two years later, they have published the most comprehensive analysis to date and concluded:
"It is not possible to confidently infer happiness from a smile, anger from a scowl, or sadness from a frown, as much of current technology tries to do when applying what are mistakenly believed to be the scientific facts."

"[How] people communicate anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise varies substantially across cultures, situations, and even across people within a single situation."

Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, author of the book How Emotions are Made and a popular TED talk on emotion, who was an author on the paper, further elaborates:
"People scowl when angry, on average, approximately 25 percent of the time, but they move their faces in other meaningful ways when angry. They might cry, or smile, or widen their eyes and gasp. And they also scowl when not angry, such as when they are concentrating or when they have a stomach ache. Similarly, most smiles don't imply that a person is happy, and most of the time people who are happy do something other than smile."

The American Civil Liberties Union has also commented on the impact of the study.

Submission + - Fidelity automatically signs up its customers for voice recognition

Submitted by maiden_taiwan on Tuesday November 21, 2017 @03:21PM

maiden_taiwan writes: Fidelity Investments is touting its new security feature, MyVoice, that allows a customer to access his/her financial accounts by telephone without a password:

"When you call Fidelity, you'll no longer have to enter PINs or passwords because Fidelity MyVoice helps you interact with us securely and more conveniently. Through natural conversation, MyVoice will detect and verify your voiceprint in the first few moments of the call. [...] Fidelity MyVoice performs even if you have a cold, allergies, or a sore throat."

Based on my own experience, Fidelity now enables MyVoice automatically for its customers who call in for other reasons. Apparently, their conversation with Fidelity customer service provides enough data for MyVoice to recognize them. (Customers are informed afterward that MyVoice has been enabled, and they can opt out, although they aren't told that opting out is possible.) In an era where Apple's face recognition is easily defeated by family members, is voice recognition any more secure? Is a "voiceprint" even possible?

Submission + - Getting a development group to adopt a standard?

Submitted by

maiden_taiwan

on Monday November 13, 2006 @01:16PM

maiden_taiwan writes: "At my software company, we occasionally need all engineers to adopt a new standard or "best practice." Some are small, like the use of Camel Case for function names, while others have tangible business value, such as "every check-in must be accompanied by a unit test." As you might guess, some new practices get ignored, not because people are evil or lazy, but because they're simply too busy to pay attention and change their work habits. So we are seeking creative ways to announce, roll out, and enforce a standard for 100+ engineers so they will actually follow it. We already know to automate compliance when possible (e.g., the revision control system could reject check-ins without unit tests), and simple platitudes like "tie compliance to their year-end bonuses" aren't helpful by themselves, as someone will still need to check compliance. The engineers here are smart people, so we want to spend less time on enforcement (having architects read the code and flag any nonstandardisms) and more on evangelization (getting engineers to see the benefits of the standards and want to follow them). I'd welcome any advice on formal processes or just plain fun ways to get people's attention."

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