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.