Intel has developed an artificial intelligence program to analyze the faces and body language of schoolchildren and students studying online and determine their emotional state. It says Tom’s Hardware.

Engineers developed the feature with Classroom Technologies and integrated it with the Zoom app. The software uses video streams from lectures that are transmitted to the algorithm along with contextual information in real time.

Intel researcher Sinem Aslan said that the main purpose of the project is to develop individual lessons, to enable the teacher to respond quickly to the mood of each student and to direct the educational process in the right direction.

Many experts have expressed concerns about the use of such technologies in education. According to them, modern algorithms cannot catch the tiniest facial expressions that signal a change in mental state. They added that different cultures display emotions in different ways.

Intel noted that the model was created taking into account the knowledge and experience of a group of psychologists who analyzed videos from real lectures recorded using laptops with 3D cameras. The experts then analyzed the data and flagged the emotions they found, creating a training dataset for the algorithm.

Recall that in April 2021 researchers presented a game to demonstrate the risks of emotion recognition by artificial intelligence.

That same month, a program’s face-detection algorithms for monitoring students during exams were accused of being biased against black students.

In August, a group of international scientists discovered that artificial intelligence cannot recognize human emotions.