Cogito Welcomes New Technical Advisor to Help Advance Emotion AI

Professor Carlos Busso, a renowned expert in the fields of emotion recognition, machine learning and affective computing, has agreed to work with Cogito as a technical advisor.

A Chilean native, Busso received his B.S., ENG, and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Chile and Ph.D. from the University of Southern California. Carlos is an associate professor at the University of Texas at Dallas where he teaches in the Electrical and Computing Engineering Department. With his background, experience, and passion for understanding human communication, Busso aims to help make Cogito’s models more advanced at recognizing human emotions.

“I am intrigued by the developments in artificial intelligence, Cogito’s current product offering and their roadmap. With my technical expertise, I hope to propel Cogito to be even more disruptive than they are today,” Carlos shared.

Carlos agreed to advise Cogito because he truly believes in the mission to help individuals become more human and empathetic. With the opportunity to be a part of a revolutionary concept that augment humans’ abilities and will pave the way for technology advancements in the future, Carlos looks to foster Cogito’s technical abilities and create more connected model applications. Carlos strongly believes that the combination of AI and humans will lead to higher productivity and fewer errors.

Carlos explained, “It’s fascinating to see how AI is changing every facet of our lives, including the ever-advancing interactions between humans and systems. Today, consumers experience AI technology behind smartphones, watches, and home devices helping them be more connected. Over the coming years, AI will quickly spread to places not yet imagined – consider all of the innovations that have come to life over the past ten years and what was once not believed feasible. As we move forward, there will be an even bigger demand for AI solutions, the potential is so great and advancing so quickly that we will have to move beyond what a user asks for and consider their true want and need.”

One of Carlos’ bold ideas is that AI systems are not perfect – and that’s the beauty of it. Machines don’t have to be 100% accurate to be useful, if models are used correctly and built to understand what the user is conveying, they can contribute to improvement. Carlos plans on experimenting with deep learning solutions and their ability to build highly effective models using limited data.

With roots in the MIT Media Lab, Cogito has a strong academic backbone and a deep respect for fundamental scientific research. In fact, many of the machine learning approaches which power the company’s AI-based technology today are highly novel and are the result of intensive research in this space. As a result, Cogito recognizes the value of being an active member of the research community and building relationships with top academics in this field. Carlos is one such academic who has already made an indelible mark in the affective computing and emotion recognition space.

To date, Carlos has introduced state-of-the-art deep learning approaches to recognizing emotion from speech. He has also made it clear to researchers in this area that approaches which lack large and appropriate datasets will have limited success. This is one of the core contributions of Carlos’ research labs’ efforts — using crowdsourcing techniques to create a continually growing dataset of diverse and naturally occurring emotion from radio and podcast shows. His recent research has demonstrated that one of the key to improving emotion recognition accuracy is by growing the size of authentic speech datasets and using effective labeling techniques. These techniques should involve multiple human annotators which helps account for the subjectivity around the perception of emotion.

Carlos’ research interests and prominence in the scientific community makes him the perfect complement to Cogito’s machine learning efforts. We look forward to benefiting from his technical oversight of our machine learning approaches and roadmap and we are excited to collaborate with him in providing industry relevance to his team’s fundamental research.

Welcome to the Cogito team, Carlos! We’re thrilled to have you!