They were winners all the way!

Updated on: Monday, December 27, 2010

Indian American Akash Krishnan and Matthew Fernandez of Portland, Oregon, USA have won America's Premier Science Research Competition for High School Students awarded to astrophysics research on star formation and computer science research on identifying emotion in the human voice in the 2010 Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology.

Inspired by the science fiction movie I, Robot, Krishnan and Fernandez developed a speech recognition technology that won them a prize of $100,000. The boys — who developed a computer algorithm that can detect a speaker's emotions better than current technology — said that they watched I, Robot, while taking a break from trying to come up with a project idea. The movie featured a robot that could detect when its user was stressed, and they decided to try to improve on the existing technology. “The team built a computer algorithm that allows us to listen to an auditory signal from a human, analyse it and assess the emotional state of the speaker,’’ said competition judge Gert Lanckriet, Department of Electrical and Computer Engin-eering, University of California, San Diego. “It can help identify, for example, if the speaker is angry, sad, bored, anxious or happy. They came up with a strong creative idea and brought it from theory into practice.’’

Krishnan and Fernandez used an emotional speech database with 18,215 files and five emotions — anger, positive, neutral, emphatic, rest. According to Lanckriet their work has a broad range of applications, from autism research to computer games and lie detection.

They were winners all the way!

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