IEEE Senior Member Fuji Ren’s work to develop
software that interprets people’s facial expressions
and, from that, their emotions has earned him the Gennai
Prize from the Ozaki Foundation of Japan.
The foundation presents this award for creative
research or invention in the fields of electronics,
information, or telecommunications. The prize consists
of a certificate of merit and 500 000 Japanese yen
(approximately US $4500).
A professor and the chair of the Department of
Information Science and Intelligent Systems at the
University of Tokushima, in Japan, Ren has applied his
research to so-called affective computing, which deals
with communication between people and computers. One
practical application of his research has been to give
people with impaired speech the ability to express their
feelings more clearly through a computer that can
recognize their facial expressions and voice
patterns.
He hopes that by incorporating emotion in the
human-computer interaction, his work will benefit the
health-care industry and social services. “When I look
at the recent developments in communication technology,
I feel more and more that there is a necessity for
emotion to work its way in,” he says.
To that end, he’s created a mental state transition
system that allows researchers to simulate changes in a
person’s mental and emotional state through software.
This is the software that analyzes a person’s facial
expressions, words, and speech patterns to recognize
emotion.
|
Fuji
Ren |
TEAMWORK Ren
credits the research team he formed in 2001 at the
university’s Faculty of Engineering with helping him
create the system. The six-person team focused on
aspects of the human mind and the development of a
program that could carry out the process of emotional
communication. The group, which eventually grew to 46
students, analyzed information contained in brain waves,
voice and speech patterns, and facial images. It also
evaluated statistical data based on the latest results
of neurological and psychological studies. The program
the group designed uses the data to recognize human
emotion and then relays the results to a computer.
Ren donated the prize money to his university because
it helped him “develop our project, and I wanted to set
a good example for our students,” he says. “They give me
energy and make me stay interested in my research.”
Seeing the number of his students expand and their
interest grow over the years has motivated Ren to
continue his work. Currently he leads four research
projects that are trying to establish additional methods
of communicating emotion and delve further into the
world of natural-language processing. The latter field
involves the study of the problems inherent in the
processing and manipulation of natural language as it is
spoken by humans for general-purpose communication, as
opposed to computer-programming jargon.
Ren received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in
computer science in 1982 and 1985, respectively, from
the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications.
In 1991 he received a doctorate in natural-language
processing from Hokkaido University, in Sapporo,
Japan.