Bera and Manocha Receive BBI Seed Funding

Two faculty members in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies were recently awarded seed funding through an interdisciplinary program focused on generating novel tools and approaches to understand complex behaviors produced by the human brain.

Aniket Bera, an assistant research professor in UMIACS, and Dinesh Manocha, the Paul Chrisman Iribe Professor of Computer Science, received a grant from the UMD Brain and Behavior Initiative (BBI) for a project that seeks to identify and classify human emotion based on a person’s gait.

The project was one of six that received BBI seed funding this year.

Bera and Manocha will collaborate with Jae Kun Shim, a professor of kinesiology who specializes in neuromechanics, to develop an automated, artificial intelligence-based technique for perceiving human emotions.

The proposed research will examine the role of age and gender on gait-based emotion recognition using deep learning. After collecting full-body gaits across age and gender in a motion-capture lab, Bera, Manocha and Shim will employ an autoencoder-based semi-supervised deep learning algorithm to learn perceived human emotions from walking style. They will then hierarchically pool these joint motions in a bottom-up manner, following kinematic chains in the human body, and coupling this data with both perceived emotion (by an external observer) and self-reported emotion.