Oregon Team Wins Siemens Competition with Emotion Recognition Project

Computer science research on recognition of emotion in the human voice earned top honors for the team of Akash Krishnan and Matthew Fernandez in the Region One Finals of the 2010-11 Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology, the nation's premier science research competition for high school students.

The Siemens Competition, a signature program of the Siemens Foundation, is administered by the College Board. The winners will be invited to compete at the National Finals in Washington, D.C., Dec. 3–6, where winners of six regional competitions will vie for the $100,000 Grand Prize and national acclaim for extraordinary scientific achievement at the high school level.

"Each year, the Siemens Foundation invites America's high school students to make their mark in the world of science," said Jeniffer Harper-Taylor, President of the Siemens Foundation. "We commend these students on rising to the challenge and pushing the envelope of scientific thought."

The students presented their research to a panel of judges from California Institute of Technology (Caltech), host of the Region One Finals.

Akash Krishnan and Matthew Fernandez, juniors at Oregon Episcopal School in Portland, Ore., won the team category and will share a $6,000 scholarship for their computer science project, The Recognition of Emotion in Human Speech.

In their research, the team sought to accurately determine emotion from the human voice. The team was inspired by the movie I, Robot, in which a robot can sense when its user is under stress. Using an emotional speech database with 18,216 files and five emotions (anger, positive, neutral, emphatic, rest), the team developed, trained and tested a classification engine to determine emotions from an input signal. By applying new techniques to emotional speech processing, the team achieved 60 percent accuracy in identifying emotions, well above other researchers' results for the same tests. Emotion recognition has applications in security, lie detection and autism research.

"Recognizing the emotion in a voice is a challenging problem, even for humans. This team took a very creative approach to the problem and made a big leap in performance over previous research," said competition judge Dr. Piotr Dollar, a postdoctoral fellow at Caltech. "They embodied the spirit of what this competition is all about, showing great initiative, independence and teamwork."

Krishnan and Fernandez have been working together as a team since the seventh grade. Dr. Bevin Daglen served as their mentor on the project. While continuing to improve on methods used in their study, the team has filed for a provisional patent and hopes to develop a device that may help autistic children identify and interpret emotions they are hearing. The students indicate they have also had interest in their project from the U.S. government.

The Siemens Competition was launched in 1998 to recognize America's best and brightest math and science students.

Featured

  • Live From ISC West: Day 2 Recap

    If it’s even possible, Day 2 of ISC West in Las Vegas, Nevada, was even busier than the first. Remember to keep tabs on our Live From ISC West page for news and updates from the show floor at the Venetian, because there’s more news coming out than anyone could be expected to keep track of. Our Live From sponsors—NAPCO Security, Alibi Security, Vistacom, RGB Spectrum, and DoorKing—kept the momentum from Day 1 going with packed booths, happy hours, giveaways, product demonstrations, and more. Read Now

    • Industry Events
    • ISC West
  • Visiting Sin City

    I’m a recovering alcoholic, ten years sober this June. I almost wrote “recovered alcoholic,” because it’s a problem I’ve long since put to bed in every practical sense. But anyone who’s dealt with addiction knows that that part of your brain never goes away. You just learn to tell the difference between that insidious voice in your head and your actual internal monologue, and you get better at telling the other guy to shut up. Read Now

  • On My Way Out the Door

    To answer that one question I always get, at every booth visit, I have seen amazing product technology, solutions and above all else, the people that make it all work. Read Now

    • Industry Events
    • ISC West
  • Return to Form

    My first security trade show was in 2021. At the time, I was awed by the sheer magnitude of the event and the spectacle of products on display. But this was the first major trade show coming out of the pandemic, and the only commentary I heard was how low the attendance was. Two representatives from one booth even spent the last morning playing catch in the aisle with their giveaway stress balls. Read Now

    • Industry Events
    • ISC West

Featured Cybersecurity

New Products

  • PDK IO Access Control Software

    PDK.IO Access Control Software

    ProdataKey now allows for "custom fields" within the interface of its pdk.io software. Custom fields increase PDK's solutions' overall functionality by allowing administrators to include a wide range of pertinent data associated with each user. 3

  • Tyco Kantech EntraPass security management software

    Tyco Kantech EntraPass security management software

    Johnson Controls, the global leader in smart, healthy and sustainable buildings, and architect of the Open Blue digital connected platforms, has released the newest version of the Tyco Kantech EntraPass security management software. 3

  • Unique Oversized ID Card Printer

    Unique Oversized ID Card Printer

    Idesco Corp. is announcing its card printer – the XCR100 2.0 printer- that allows customers to personalize oversized ID cards on demand. The printer is ideal for assisting healthcare organizations find the right badging solution. As healthcare facilities continue to combat the spread of COVID-19, issuing oversized ID cards has helped identify staff clearly while adding an extra layer of security. The XCR100 2.0 printer is the only dye-sublimation printer on the market that can personalize CR100 cards (3.88" x 2.63"). The cards that are 42% larger than the standard credit card size. The printer can produce up to 180 full cards per hour in color, and up to 1,400 cards per hour in monochrome. An optional flipper is available to print dual-sided badges in one pass. Contactless encoding comes as an option to help healthcare facilities produce secure access badges on demand and the card printer features a 2-year warranty. 3