Experimenting with Robotics and AI

Being raised by a non traditional Latin mother, I learned from an early age how to help doing the housework, I hated it nonetheless. Being married to a non traditional Vietnamese woman, she made sure that the housework was almost equally distributed between the two. At home I am in charge of washing the dishes…

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime” reads the old proverb. After jumping on the Deep Learning bandwagon (but this applies to the Big Data, and any other bandwagon), I (my Neural Nets) have been constantly fed, and…

During my quest to build emotion detection from faces, I had always assumed there was no available system to compare my own with. Not because there are no companies or hobbyist already building such thing, but because the companies making the headlines are keeping details of their work in obscurity. Turns out I was wrong.…

Teaching a machine how to recognize objects (cars, houses, and cats) is a difficult task, teaching it to recognize emotions is another story. If you have been following my posts, you then know that I want to teach machines to recognize human emotions. One important way in which machines can detect our feelings is by…

So I want to build Artificial Emotional Intelligence (AEI), and I already wrote about a possible application to treat mental health problems. Even the big guns like Apple Inc. are trying to build AEI (for some obscure reason). So the obvious step when you want to build something is to study and to do research.…

Apple just bought Emotient, a startup that uses Artificial Intelligence to read people’s emotions by analyzing their facial expressions. Also, in October of 2015 it bought VocalIQ, another startup that uses speech technology to teach machines to understand the way people speak. As usual, Apple did not disclose the reasons behind the acquisitions. Why is…

“An estimated one in five people in the U.S. have a diagnosable mental disorder.”and “… cost an estimated $467 billion in the U.S. in lost productivity and medical expenses ($2.5 trillion globally).” are some of the lines that can be read in an interesting article about Virtual Reality Therapy published in TechCrunch. Now just like…

In October last year I finally got my long awaited PhD degree. My research topic was Sentiment Analysis (SA), a sub-field of Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing that seeks to identify the polarity of any given text. Put in simpler words, given any subjective text, SA seeks to tell wether the text is positive,…