Coming Soon: The Robot Teacher That Reads Your Face

If facial recognition software that can compare your features to a criminal database, or gather data for advertisers, wasn't futuristic enough for you, consider this: Someday when you're taking a class from a robot instructor, it might be able to tell how well you understand the material solely based on your facial expressions. Jacob Whitehill, a computer science PhD student at the University of California, San Diego, has created software that would allow him to control how fast a video played just by moving his face. That was the first step, he says—showing that a computer could pick up on facial movements and, if it was programmed correctly, use those movements as instructions. You can check out video of his "smile detector" here. But for a robot to read your face, it must first know what all your blinks and nods mean. Whitehill is now studying lots of faces of ...