By Alice Damgaard Sprotte, Create

Can artificial intelligence do social good?

The department’s newly appointed Distinguished Professor, Sergio Escalera, believes so. The next three years, the department has the pleasure of working together with him. 

He has already worked closely with the VAP at AAU, and this new relationship with AAU will provide an additional boost to our cooperation and push further joint research to cover real people needs.

Artificial Intelligence and social good

Sergio Escalera has a special focus on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and social good. In his perspective, AI should help people.

He points to intelligent systems that can automatically characterize human behavior. These systems will allow AI to boost empathy and adapt to the health and welfare needs of people. Therefore, he wants to help in the development of new algorithms that learn from visual and multimodal data in order to recognize important aspects of human behavior, such as actions, interactions with the environment, facial expressions, and automatically relate them to needs, risks, and feelings, among others.

In his Professorship, he will mainly be involved in Computer Vision and Machine Learning. However, in order to advance the research on the automatic analysis of human behavior for social good, there is a need for a multidisciplinary effort. In that sense, the AI for the People Center of AAU is also an additional excellent instrument where he expects to find complementary multidisciplinary knowledge from engineering, social science, humanities, and medicine, among others, to bring new AI developments closer to social needs.

How people benefit from interaction with technology

Sergio Escalera points to a list of areas where people benefit from interaction with technology, and where he already has done research:

• Automatic Sign Language Recognition from visual data to improve communication with the deaf community
• Automatic monitoring of the inpatient in hospitals and pain recognition
• Human Computer-Robot Interaction by means of non-invasive human interfaces, e.g. hand gestures
• Automatic monitoring of the elder for active aging: recognizing daily activities, provide reminders, intelligent coaching, recognize risk events, e.g. falls
• Automatic recognition of abnormal behaviors in security scenarios
• Automatic recognition of facial expressions of emotions and behaviors in mental health to support diagnosis and monitor treatment
• Automatic recognition of behaviors in physiotherapy and rehabilitation
• Automatic recognition of physical exercise performance in fitness and personal sports coaching

Learn more about Sergio Escalera and his research

Learn more about AI in Surveillance, Inspection and Security 

Learn more about Sergio Escalera 

See Sergio Escaleras personal web page