As awareness grows, more Japanese adults are receiving answers to struggles that went unrecognized for years. Social camouflaging can help neurodivergent people navigate social situations, but researchers say the effort often comes with significant emotional and mental strain. The first major crisis in Yosuke's life came when he stood in front of his students. Until then, the 24-year-old had navigated his life with few obstacles. He had done well in school, scored highly on IQ tests and graduated from university without any major issues. But after securing his dream job as a geography and history teacher at a girls' high school two years ago, cracks began to show. "I couldn't read the room," says Yosuke, who recalls struggling to organize course materials and wrap up classes on time.

In this study, we present a quantitative and comprehensive analysis of social gaze in people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Diverging from traditional first-person camera perspectives based on eye-tracking technologies, this study utilizes a third-person perspective database from the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule, 2nd Edition (ADOS-2) interview videos, encompassing ASD participants and neurotypical individuals as a reference group. Employing computational models, we extracted and processed gaze-related features from the videos of both participants and examiners. The experimental samples were divided into three groups based on the presence of social gaze abnormalities and ASD diagnosis. This study quantitatively analyzed four gaze features: gaze engagement, gaze variance, gaze density map, and gaze diversion frequency. Furthermore, we developed a classifier trained on these features to identify gaze abnormalities in ASD participants. Together, we demonstrated the effectiveness of analyzing social gaze in people with ASD in naturalistic settings, showcasing the potential of third-person video perspectives in enhancing ASD diagnosis through gaze analysis.

Autism is a serious developmental disorder that impairs the ability to communicate and interact. Autism spectrum disorder impacts the nervous system and affects the overall cognitive, emotional, social and physical health of the affected individual. According to a new study from the Stanford University School of Medicine, brain organisation differs between boys and girls with autism. The study was published in'The British Journal of Psychiatry'. The differences, identified by analyzing hundreds of brain scans with artificial intelligence techniques, were unique to autism and not found in typically developing boys and girls.

Would you like to stay up to date with the latest robotics & AI research from top roboticists? The IEEE/RSJ IROS2020 (International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems) recently released their Plenary and Keynote talks in the IEEE RAS YouTube channel. Abstract: Computational modeling of cognitive development has the potential to uncover the underlying mechanism of human intelligence as well as to design intelligent robots. We have been investigating whether a unified theory accounts for cognitive development and what computational framework embodies such a theory. This talk introduces a neuroscientific theory called predictive coding and shows how robots as well as humans acquire cognitive abilities using predictive processing neural networks.

The HDCA programme will create genomic reference maps of all the cells that are important for human development, which will revolutionise our understanding of health and disease, from miscarriages and children's developmental disorders, through to cancer and ageing. The HDCA is one part of the ambitious Human Cell Atlas (HCA), a global consortium that aims to transform biological research and medicine by mapping every cell in the human body. Progress on the HDCA and other aspects of the Human Cell Atlas were discussed at the international HCA meeting at the Wellcome Genome Campus, Cambridge, this week. Many diseases have their origin in early human development, and a detailed understanding of development is key to explaining human health and disease. Researchers at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and Newcastle University have collected genomic data from over 250 thousand cells from a range of donated developing human tissues including liver, skin, kidney and placenta.

The social world that most of us navigate effortlessly can prove to be a perplexing and disconcerting place for individuals with autism. Currently there are no models to assist non-expert authors as they create customized social script-based instructional modules for a particular child. We describe an approach to using human computation to develop complex models of social scripts for a plethora of complex and interesting social scenarios, possible obstacles that may arise in those scenarios, and potential solutions to those obstacles. Human input is the natural way to build these models, and in so doing create valuable assistance for those trying to navigate the intricacies of a social life.