Mona Lisa was 83 per cent happy and I am 27.48 per cent Unhappy

Nicu Sebe from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands tested emotion-recognition software on Monalisa’s smile. Why am I unhappy about it?

His algorithm examines key facial features such as the curvature of the lips and crinkles around the eyes, then scores each face with respect to six basic emotions. Sebe drew on a database of young female faces to derive an average “neutral” expression, which the software used as a standard to compare the painting against.

According to this software Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was 83 per cent happy, 9 per cent disgusted, 6 per cent fearful and 2 per cent angry.

Such algorithm suffers from several flaws including but not limited to correctly identifying proper response categorization of test subjects, cultural bias etc.

Imagine asking a volunteer about her happiness percentage. I think doing such a study and publishing it is a travesty of science and waste of taxpayers money.

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