Phoenix, AZ -- (SBWIRE) -- 04/07/2015 -- A Rumor of Empathy on the Air, Lou Agosta to Interview Dan McDuff, Principal Scientist, Affectiva Software: Starting April 8, 2015 at noon CDT

Join Lou Agosta for a conversation with Dan McDuff, Principal Scientist at Affectiva (http://www.affectiva.com), a software company that is transforming our understanding of the expression of emotions in the human face. Innovations in machine vision and pattern recognition are advancing the automated understanding of the expression of human emotions. Affectiva was founded in 2009 by Rana el Kaliouby and Rosalind W. Picard, scientists at the MIT Media Lab. In a conversation with Dan, our audience will learn how innovations in the computer-mediated assessment of the emotions are being implemented and brought to market in a variety of applications in advertising and media measurement (Affectiva's current chosen market), robotics, and emotion-prosthetics. One innovation that McDuff, Kaliouby and Picard helped bring to Affectiva from their work at the MIT Media Lab was the use of webcams to collect facial data from persons providing informed consent. This has enabled Affectiva to build a Big Data database of facial expressions to power the processing of its software algorithms. Simply stated, the output of the software process is as assessment of the individual's emotional experience along a number of dimensions and variables.

The human face is an emotional "hot spot". New-born babies seem to gravitate spontaneously towards the face of the caretaker. The human face is an emotionally expressive display that is more than the sum of its parts. The face forms a total configuration that manifests a person's humanity in a way especially engaging to another person. We humans seem to be hard-wired to interact with faces as the location for emotional expression – and the lack of expression. Freud famously said "betrayal oozes at every pore." Though Freud's quip is not about his patient Dora's facial expression as such, his slogan applies. Charles Darwin was the first propose that facial expressions of emotion could be thought of as a universal language. Since the late 1800's a whole field of research has developed. Listeners will have an opportunity to phone in with questions for Dan and Lou about understanding the emotions.

Dan McDuff: Daniel McDuff received his Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab while working in the Affective Computing group. McDuff received his bachelor's degree, with first-class honors, and master's degree in engineering from the University of Cambridge. Prior to joining the Media Lab, he worked for the Defense Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) in the United Kingdom. He is interested in using computer vision, wearable sensors and machine learning to enable the automated recognition of affect. He is also interested in technologies and interfaces for remote measurement of physiology for which his work has received an award from Popular Science magazine as one of the top inventions in 2011.

SEE: (http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~djmcduff)

Lou Agosta is the author of three books on empathy. He teaches empathy in the history and systems of psychology at Argosy University. His PhD in philosophy is from the University of Chicago where he delivered a thesis on empathy and interpretation in philosophy.

See http://www.aRumorOfEmpathy.com

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