Irfan Essa’s Academic Activities

Awarded the “GVU 15 years of Impact Award” at GVU 15 Anniversary Celebration and Symposium on October 25, 2007.

• Schedule
• Event Photos
• List of Recipients
• Book of Awards
• QuickTime Movie

GT Research Horizons — Fall 2003

Anne Eisenberg (2001)“A ‘Smart’ Home, to Avoid the Nursing Home”New York Times Circuits Section,

April 5, 2001 Issue

Quote from the Article: “Cameras are going to rule one day at the Georgia Tech house, though, staff members there say. Dr. Irfan A. Essa, a computer science professor at Georgia Tech, is one of the people building a tracking system, based on video cameras, that will one day replace radio frequency tags. ”We can locate where the person is,” Dr. Essa said, ”and make a first-level guess at where this person is heading using the optical sensors.””

Daniel Goldman (1997 “Laugh and Your Computer Will Laugh With You, Someday” Jan 7, 1997 Issue, New York Times, Science Times

Quote from the article: “Emotions like fear, sadness and anger each announce themselves through a unique signature of changes in facial muscle, vocal inflection, physiological arousal, and other such cues. Building on techniques of pattern recognition already used for computer comprehension of words and images, Dr. Irfan Essa, a computer scientist at Georgia Tech, has constructed a computer system that can read people’s emotions from changes in their facial expression.”

Alex Pentland (1996), “Smart Rooms”Scientific American, April 1996

Quote from the Article: “Facial expression is almost as important as identity. A teaching program, for example, should know if its students look bored. So once our smart room has found and identified someone’s face, it analyzes the expression. Yet another computer compares the facial motion the camera records with maps depicting the facial motions involved in making various expressions. Each expression, in fact, involves a unique collection of muscle movements. When you smile, you curl the corners of your mouth and lift certain parts of your forehead; when you fake a smile, though, you move only your mouth. In experiments conducted by scientist Irfan A. Essa and me, our system has correctly judged expressions-among a small group of subjects-98 percent of the time.”

Evan I. Schwartz (1995) “A Face of One’s Own | Memory, Emotions, & Decisions”, DISCOVER MagazineDecember 1, 1995.

Quote from the Article: “Chief among the members of his staff working on the problem is computer scientist Irfan Essa. To get computers to read facial expressions such as happiness or anger, Essa has designed three-dimensional animated models of common facial movements. His animated faces move according to biomedical data gathered from facial surgeons and anatomists. Essa uses this information to simulate exactly what happens when a person’s static, expressionless face, whose muscles are completely relaxed and free of stress, breaks out into a laugh or a frown or some other expression of emotion.”