Maybe its the orange cutoff on the side and the exposed chest area that many feminine clothing styles sport. If you put your hand over his chest, It looks like a masculine einstein lol.

As for the project itself, this is very, interesting.

Posted at 11:57 am on Jul 10th, 2009 by Taylor

Wait! Just saw the video- yeah, Idk why but the video looks very feminine.

(Bonus points for orgasm face at 0:07)

Posted at 11:59 am on Jul 10th, 2009 by Taylor

1. neckline is too slender for a man.
2. hairstyle, hair density, and hairline are feminine.
3. eyes are way too youthful and shiny for an older male.
4. the outfit as noted by taylor.
5. the jawline and eyebrows look like cosmetic surgery or other modifications associated with female appearance upkeep (tweezed brows?)

Posted at 12:13 pm on Jul 10th, 2009 by moore850

Could it be the curly hair and the fact that he (it) is wearing a famine wig and a something that resembles a dress.

Posted at 12:16 pm on Jul 10th, 2009 by Anthony

i think everyone is missing the point here, it never learned anything, or at least i was not convinced it had learned anything new at all.

walt disney has been doing this “trick” for many years with their innovative robotics teams. some way or another information was ALREADY provided about facial expressions, mean the machine was just doing what it was told.

like always.

Posted at 12:31 pm on Jul 10th, 2009 by sunjester

simple application of a neural network

Posted at 12:41 pm on Jul 10th, 2009 by bort

@sunjester, how is this different than traditional learning? I was “told” how to tie my shoes in a similar manner.

Posted at 12:57 pm on Jul 10th, 2009 by cptfalcon

It looks like it’s is wearing a Paula Dean wig.
This is pretty interesting but I feel like there should be a more exact way of doing this.
Has anything else been done with this?
I can see a pretty neat application using a webcam to see a user’s face and einstein would copy it.

Also, at 0:23, sad or high?

Posted at 1:00 pm on Jul 10th, 2009 by DanDawson

“it’s a me, mario! i’m a 60 years old!”

Posted at 1:04 pm on Jul 10th, 2009 by pRtkL xLr8r

facial expressions is a waste of processing power , why dont they use their time on something useful

Posted at 1:12 pm on Jul 10th, 2009 by therian

why someone would care that future vacuum cleaner will be able to make faces instead of doing it primary work better & faster

Posted at 1:14 pm on Jul 10th, 2009 by therian

Uhmm canny valley comming closer… yeah Im definitely freaked!

Posted at 1:38 pm on Jul 10th, 2009 by Ricki

I would have to agree with some that this is not actually learning anything. This reminds me of the whole “put monkeys in a room for so many hundred years or so and the will write shakespear” (To inaccurately paraphrase).
This just proves how far we truly are to mimicking complex biological phenomena with an over-simplistic code counterpart. The year 2009!

Posted at 2:13 pm on Jul 10th, 2009 by Taylor

@cptfalcon
I think there’s an assumption that being taught and learning are different.

Learning would involve guessing until there’s a reward.

Posted at 2:18 pm on Jul 10th, 2009 by _matt

@_matt
Idk, learning in itself is a very complex process:

The program seems to work only by iterations, that at any random interval could be accepted as a plausible facial expression, resulting in a reward, and thus that face is saved.

In real life, organisms ( the more intelligent ones, anyway ) don’t just learn by trial and error, and it is not all just guesswork; there are calculations and things like boolean / fuzzy logic are applied to the situation, and it is mostly done by the process, “a relatively minimal action- observation- calculation- repeat”.

What I am saying is, you and I both know we did not learn how to smile by brute-forcing facial expressions. We observed with audio, visual, and other sources of input.

Posted at 2:31 pm on Jul 10th, 2009 by zenny

I’m guessing it looks effeminate because of the slender neck and no perceptible adam’s apple.

Posted at 6:19 pm on Jul 10th, 2009 by doug

It’s the painfully obvious wig with a feminine hairline.

Posted at 6:41 pm on Jul 10th, 2009 by MattieShoes

I would hope that the people involved with identifying the different facial expressions don’t have Aspergers or anything on the Autistic spectrum. As someone with Aspergers I find reading body language & subtle facial expressions difficult.

Posted at 7:42 pm on Jul 10th, 2009 by Haku

who rewarded the robot for making the “stoned” look on the left of the picture montage at the top of the page?

“what reward do you give a robot?”

chips, obviously.

Posted at 8:21 pm on Jul 10th, 2009 by RobotGuy

i’d hit it..

Posted at 10:07 pm on Jul 10th, 2009 by Bill ate a Cat

And this is relevant as a hack exactly how? This has been blogged by a half dozen sites already – hackaday doesn’t need this.

Posted at 10:56 pm on Jul 10th, 2009 by MJ

Too deep in the uncanny valley.

Posted at 11:32 pm on Jul 10th, 2009 by headbonk

it is technically an ai hack. by combining random actions with “rewards” (positive feedback, basically binary response…either this combination of actions is good or not) learning can be faked.

Posted at 11:59 pm on Jul 10th, 2009 by spacecoyote

OMG! It’s Helen Hunt!

Posted at 6:25 am on Jul 11th, 2009 by Chris

“Hello, I am uncomfortably androgynous Mark Twain. Sometimes a feel more like a man, and sometimes more like a woman. Will you help me explore my sexuality?”, the robot said with a provocative expression.

Posted at 6:29 pm on Jul 11th, 2009 by F7

@bort
time to call in derek smart. JK

Posted at 8:05 pm on Jul 11th, 2009 by Thomascpp

Man, I’m glad you mentioned that. The first thing I thought was, “Why does that robot look like a woman dressed as Einstein?”

Posted at 9:13 pm on Jul 11th, 2009 by mark question

It’s not a hack/fake really. It is actually a fair approximation of how we work (just badly described)…

Reinforcement learning usually approximates what goes on inside our brains to learn – this is learning in exactly the same way as us, but many orders of magnitude simpler. As said above, it’s probably a fairly straightforward application of a neural network. Neural nets can implement fuzzy logic, reasoning, decisions, etc, so it’s fair to say it’s using fairly complex AI technology. It’s just a bit unimaginative.

A more imaginative application of the tech has already been covered here:
http://hackaday.com/2008/08/12/autonomous-helicopter-learns-autorotation/

Posted at 6:22 am on Jul 12th, 2009 by Josiah

I thought that was Joan Rivers.

Posted at 6:09 pm on Jul 12th, 2009 by damntech

While I certainly can’t disagree this is pretty typical for an AI project, the problem is that we learn to make facial expressions as a result of communicating emotions. There does not seem to be any correlation here between the facial and internal state, only learning expressions independent of anything. While that may or may not save some programming time, it still would require some human to come in and correlate the particular expressions with some symbolic representation for communication; hardly psychologically plausible.

Posted at 8:04 am on Jul 13th, 2009 by snide