Robots can be trained to recognise specific human body language and teach it to children with autism, a new study has shown. British psychologists and computer scientists used the responses of 284 humans to train a computer algorithm to identify different emotions including excitement, sadness, aggression and boredom from their movements even if it cannot see their facial expressions or hear their voices. Researchers claimed that robots could be programmed in the same way to understand and replicate many different emotions and teach children to identify them through "emotional training". Dr Charlotte Edmunds of Warwick Business School, who led the research project, said: "Our results suggest it is reasonable to expect a machine learning algorithm, and consequently a robot, to recognise a range of emotions and social interactions using movements, poses, and facial expressions. The potential applications are huge."

In the early 1990s, Lisa Feldman Barrett had a problem. She was running an experiment to investigate how emotions affect self-perception, but her results seemed to be consistently wrong. She was studying for a PhD in the psychology of the self at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. As part of her research, she tested some of the textbook assumptions that she had been taught, including the assumption that people feel anxiety or depression when, despite living up to their own expectations, they do not live up to the expectations of others. But after designing and running her experiment, she discovered that her test subjects weren't distinguishing between anxiety and depression.

Nine-year-old Alex Cullenbine was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder at six years old - but his mum, Donji, said she knew from 18 months that something was different. He avoided making eye contact, was slow to develop speech and was overly sensitive to sounds. Since his diagnosis, he had received behavioural therapy one or two times a week but he remained gaze avoidant. However, a few weeks after he started taking part in a small trial funded by the US government, at Stanford University, Donji noticed a difference in her son. "He was starting to flick glances to my eyes and then dart his gaze away. At first it happened a few times a day, which was absolutely stunning. I remember catching my breath and almost doing a mental double-take. "It gradually progressed to a handful of times per day, particularly when he wanted me to listen to him with my full undivided attention." People with autism can struggle to maintain eye contact and recognise emotions - and the scheme Alex had taken part in had been teaching him how to recognise emotions using Google glasses and an app. The glasses had a camera to record his field of view as well as a small screen and speaker to give him visual and audio information. As he interacted with other people, the app identified their emotions and told him via the glasses. He also used it as a game where he would have to guess the facial expression being shown by his mum or other adults. He used the system three times a week for six weeks and Donji says it "transformed" how Alex felt about looking at faces. "The glasses made a game of looking and gave him a key to decoding what he was seeing.

LONDON, UK – Think back to your last year in customer interactions. How many customer complaints did you process? Out of those, how many people complained about contact centre wait times? Now, ask yourself: how many of those customers were angry, sad, or dissatisfied about the level of service they received? Satisfying customers, it seems, is a neverending challenge.

The insecurity of employment is much higher these days because of a high level of competition. Outsourcing is not restricted to humans anymore. Instead of worrying about other people stealing your job, you may now be anxious that you might lose it to automation. In simpler words, you should be worried that robots may take away your job. Now, robots not only mean machines that look like humans (the ones we typically see in movies).

Building on earlier work which teaches computers to recognise emotions and expressions in human faces, the system is able to detect the distinct parts of a sheep's face and compare it with a standardised measurement tool developed by veterinarians for diagnosing pain. Their results will be presented today (1 June) at the 12th IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition in Washington, DC. Severe pain in sheep is associated with conditions such as foot rot, an extremely painful and contagious condition which causes the foot to rot away; or mastitis, an inflammation of the udder in ewes caused by injury or bacterial infection. Both of these conditions are common in large flocks, and early detection will lead to faster treatment and pain relief. Reliable and efficient pain assessment would also help with early diagnosis.