AI innovations are one of the most relevant topics of the 21st century. AI is everywhere in our everyday life, but to many people this presence is very abstract. Therefore, the Technological Museum of Vienna has created an exhibition on robotics and AI to help uncover the surrounding myths. The museum wants to give visitors a transparent look at the utopias and hysterias surrounding humanoid robots and autonomous systems. The exhibition allows visitors to dive into the fascinating algorithms of artificial intelligence. We were happy to collaborate on one of the exhibits: The Mirror Cube, where people can experience what it is like to “become data”.

We can no longer imagine a world without interacting with machines. Staying informed on developments in human-computer interaction research is important; therefore, VicarVision is happy to be a member of the Man-Machine Interaction Platform (MMI). MMI is a Dutch platform with people from business, universities, and research institutes that aims to support collaboration and knowledge exchange in this field.

VicarVision hosted the most recent (online) member meeting on our own expertise: the use of artificial intelligence for emotion recognition. We addressed this topic from multiple viewpoints with presentations on the technology and applications, but also presentations related to ethics of A.I.

Computer algorithms can help determine what media messages we see. They help analyze what we think of it. But how smart are these artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms? And are they creative? Can AI create an actual Eurovision song? These were some of the questions and topics raised at the Cross Media Café, which is an initiative of Media Perspectives and The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. At this interesting event, we were asked to give a talk about our online emotion analysis platform, FaceReader Online. In this blog post, we would like to share some of the interesting insights that we heard and shared (see also in Dutch this Media Perspectives blog post).

Last year we received an innovation grant from INNOLABS, for our project H2A2 – A Healthy Heart with Automated Assistance – to create an unobtrusive health monitoring tool. With an innovative technique, called remote photoplethysmography (remote PPG), heart rate can be detected from the face. This functionality is already available in FaceReader. Since this technique requires high quality recordings, we wanted to test whether it is also accurate when the camera of a mobile device was used. Together with our partner PLUX, a Portuguese company specialized in advanced biosignals monitoring platforms, and a Portuguese telecommunication company IT, we collected physiological ground truth data and video recordings from a tablet. This data can validate the heart rate assessment and emotion classification on a mobile device.

The retail sector is changing rapidly with offline and online changes and new available technologies. In the Future-Proof Retail project, a collaboration of more than 20 partners, retailers and students explore the question of how retailers can be ready for the future. TMO fashion business school organized HYPE labs in Delft and Rijswijk to investigate the 21st century skill of employees. For 3 weeks in April, 12 different stores tested 7 different technologies: such as NFC tags, robotic assistance, VR-glasses, and Vicar Analytics (see video impression). Vicar Analytics was installed in a large Albert Heijn supermarket in Rijswijk and two clothing stores in Delft.