What It's Like to Brainstorm with a Bot

Contrary to what many of my friends believe, good academics are always working--at least in the sense that when we're stuck on a problem, which is most of the time, it's impossible to leave it behind. A worthwhile problem is a brainworm: it stays with you until it's resolved or replaced by another one. My Dartmouth colleague Luke Chang, a neuroscientist who studies what happens in people's heads when we communicate, is no stranger to this affliction. One day, on a long drive back to Hanover, he found himself preoccupied with such a worm. The drive up I-89 is usually uneventful--a straight shot north, ideal for letting your mind off the leash. But Luke's mind snagged on a technical challenge: how to turn a decent model of facial expression into something truly convincing. The aim was to encode the various nuanced ways human faces transmit states of mind, and then to visualize them; smiles and frowns are the barest beginning. The spectrum of human emotions and intentions is embodied in a range of expressions which serve as a basic alphabet for communication.