Imagine you're on your daily commute to work, driving along a crowded highway while trying to resist looking at your phone. You're already a little stressed out because you didn't sleep well, woke up late, and have an important meeting in a couple hours, but you just don't feel like your best self. Suddenly another car cuts you off, coming way too close to your front bumper as it changes lanes. Your already-simmering emotions leap into overdrive, and you lay on the horn and shout curses no one can hear. Except someone--or, rather, something--can hear: your car.

One of today's more popular artificially intelligent (AI) androids comes from the TV series "MARVEL's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." Those of you who followed the latest season's story -- no spoilers here! One of the most interesting things about this fictional AI character is that it can read people's emotions. Thanks to researchers from the University of Cambridge, this AI ability might soon make the jump from sci-fi to reality. The first step in creating such a system is training an algorithm on simpler facial expressions and just one specific emotion or feeling. To that end, the Cambridge team focused on using a machine learning algorithm to figure out if a sheep is in pain, and this week, they presented their research at the IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition in Washington, D.C.