DetectionData science improves lie detection
Someone is fidgeting in a long line at an airport security gate. Is that person simply nervous about the wait? Or is this a passenger who has something sinister to hide? Even highly trained Transportation Security Administration (TSA) airport security officers still have a hard time telling whether someone is lying or telling the truth – despite the billions of dollars and years of study that have been devoted to the subject. Researchers are using data science and an online crowdsourcing framework called ADDR (Automated Dyadic Data Recorder) to further our understanding of deception based on facial and verbal cues.
Someone is fidgeting in a long line at an airport security gate. Is that person simply nervous about the wait?
Or is this a passenger who has something sinister to hide?
Even highly trained Transportation Security Administration (TSA) airport security officers still have a hard time telling whether someone is lying or telling the truth – despite the billions of dollars and years of study that have been devoted to the subject.
Now, University of Rochester researchers are using data science and an online crowdsourcing framework called ADDR (Automated Dyadic Data Recorder) to further our understanding of deception based on facial and verbal cues.
They also hope to minimize instances of racial and ethnic profiling that TSA critics contend occurs when passengers are pulled aside under the agency’s Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques (SPOT) program.
“Basically, our system is like Skype on steroids,” says Tay Sen, a Ph.D. student in the lab of Ehsan Hoque, an assistant professor of computer science. Sen collaborated closely with Karmul Hasan, another Ph.D. student in the group, on two papers in IEEE Automated Face and Gesture Recognition and the Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquituous Technologies. The papers describe the framework the lab has used to create the largest publicly available deception dataset so far – and why some smiles are more deceitful than others.
Game reveals the truth behind a smile
Rochester explains how ADDR works: Two people sign up on Amazon Mechanical Turk, the crowdsourcing internet marketplace that matches people to tasks that computers are currently unable to do. A video assigns one person to be the describer and the other to be the interrogator.
