M. Ehsan Hoque, MSc

M. Ehsan Hoque, MSc is Ph.D. Student at Affective Computing Group, MIT Media Laboratory.
 
Ehsan’s research efforts are about helping people with their communication difficulties in face-to-face interaction by developing and drawing techniques from computer vision, speech processing, machine learning, and multimodal data fusion.
 
More specifically, the majority of the information that we convey in face-to-face communication is through non-verbal means (facial expressions, prosody in speech, body gesture etc.) rather than the actual words that we speak. People with social anxiety have difficulty understanding and interpreting those cues in appropriate context. His work involves understanding and developing computational models to recognize those non-verbal cues in face-to-face interactions. Currently, he is focusing on developing game driven virtual environments where people with social anxiety (e.g., autism, asperger syndrome) could practice social communication according to their own preference, pace, and liking.
 
In 2009, Ehsan was awarded an IEEE Gold Humanitarian Fellowship for his effort to improve peoples’ the quality of life with the aid of technology.
 
In the past, as part of a class project at MIT, Ehsan and his team developed mobile SMS technology allowing rural farmers of Zacatecas, Mexico to aggregate their produce information, and query current/historical market price in real time. This not only imposed price transparency in the market, but also allowed farmers to have better bargaining abilities against the middle-men. At the end of the course, as part of his evaluation and testing, he traveled to Zacatecas, Mexico, and deployed the project.
 
Ehsan’s papers include Exploring Temporal Patterns in Classifying Frustrated and Delighted Smiles, Determining the Viability of Electrically Treating 6061 T6511 Aluminum for Use in Manufacturing Processes, Are you friendly or just polite? — Analysis of smiles in spontaneous face-to-face interactions, Acted vs. natural frustration and delight: Many people smile in natural frustration, Exploring Speech Therapy Games with Children on the Autism Spectrum, The Interaction between Information and Intonation Structure: Prosodic Marking of Theme and Rheme, and Multimodal Communication in Face-to-Face Computer-Mediated Conversations. Read the full list of his publications!
 
Ehsan earned his Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering at Pennsylvania State University in 2004. He earned his Masters in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Memphis, Tennessee in 2007. He is currently completing his Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
 
Watch MIT Mood Meter at the FAST Future Forum on the Arts. Read What’s In A Smile? Turns Out Computers Best Humans at Parsing What’s Genuine and Frustrated? You’re Probably Smiling Anyway. Read his LinkedIn profile. Follow his Twitter feed.