How he’d describe his work to a 10-year-old: “I’m helping machines see the world like humans do.”

More: Read about all Intel Innovators | Artificial Intelligence | Intel Labs (Intel.com)

Imagine a machine that tells if you’re happy or sad: Anbang leads a small team of artificial intelligence (AI) researchers at Intel Labs China in Beijing. They work to significantly advance computer vision, a specific field of research that allows machines to gain more insight from digital content. His team’s goal? Create computers that accurately detect and understand a person’s emotional state by pairing a visual camera and microphone with smart AI software.

Meet the “advanced emotion recognition engine”: Three years ago, Anbang and his team created intelligent, highly sophisticated software that can detect seven distinct human emotions: disgust, anger, fear, sadness, happiness, surprise and contempt. Their work is gaining notice across the industry, winning first place in a 2017 worldwide AI competition called EmotiW. Today, a version of Anbang’s AI engine is available in Intel® RealSense™ cameras.

Richer data boosts accuracy: To more accurately gauge the emotion someone is expressing, Anbang weaves both visual and audio data into his recognition engine, which produces a “confidence score,” a percentage figure that indicates the AI’s degree of confidence in the result. Most leading visual recognition systems on the market today rely only on visual data.

Far-out tech with far-reaching impact: With commercial applications likely years away, Intel teams work on proof-of-concept tests to explore and demonstrate how this technology might be used. For example, when this AI engine is paired with a camera, it could ensure a car will not start if it detects the driver is intoxicated; it could be used in home-care robots for the elderly; or it can act as an improved voice assistant that interacts with you at a level beyond verbal commands.

When Anbang met PC: Anbang grew up in a poor village in China’s northwestern Gansu province. He earned his Ph.D. in information and communication engineering from China’s Tsinghua University, though he had never seen, much less used, a computer before he went to college.

Leaving a visible impact on our lives: “I grew up watching advertisements of computers on my family’s aging television, and I somehow always knew I wanted to be a computer scientist one day,” he says. “Today, the work we’re doing in this field is going to change many lives. I can’t wait to see how our customers are going to use our technology in their products.”

» Click for full image