U of M decodes emotions of Olympic medalists [Video]

MINNEAPOLIS — Athletes from around the world will soon compete for gold in the summer Olympics in Paris, but for those who come up just short, bronze might bring more happiness than silver.

A research team at the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management used facial expression software to analyze more than 400 photos of Olympic athletes on the medal podium. 

“The software uses machine learning or artificial intelligence,” said William Hedgcock, an associate professor of marketing at the Carlson School of Management. “It decodes facial expressions and measures the ’emotional intensity’ of different expressions, including neutral happy, sad, angry, surprised, scared, disgusted, and contempt. 

These are the expressions we can actually encode with a certain amount of accuracy. There are many other emotions but we can’t code them by looking …