Guoying Zhao´s Academy Professor period started

Prestigious Academy Professor is the highest academic position in Finland. Zhao feels honored and says that this is a recognition for the whole team at the Center for Machine Vision and Signal Analysis, University of Oulu.

-It is not only a recognition of my group’s past achievement but also a trust with high expectations of our future plan’s innovation and high impact for both research and society. I have an amazing team. Thanks to all my team members and supports from our research unit CMVS.

In the long run Academy Professor position also means steadiness for the research plans.

-It firstly provides a stable and large volume of funding so we can deeply investigate novel computer vision (CV) and machine learning (ML) methodology to study how artificial intelligence (AI) can recognize human emotions and bring emotion AI to human-computer interaction and computer mediated human-human interaction for boosting remote communication and collaboration.

In addition to expressed visual cues, AI technology is expected to identify suppressed and unseen emotional signals, and at the same time, mask people’s identity information for protecting privacy.

-We will be able to work with worldwide leading experts from different disciplines, e.g., psychology, cognition sciences, education, medicine, and industry, to advance the emotional intelligence with solutions based on new AI, CV and ML technologies, and improve understanding of the significance of emotions in the context of interactions and collaborations. The research knowledge generated can accelerate innovations for, e.g., real-world e-teaching, e-service, health, and security applications.

For five years, Zhao can concentrate fully on research. AI is a field with fast updates, new technology emerging every day.

-With successful research supported by this grant, big breakthroughs can be expected, and our team will keep leading in the field.

Zhao is originally from China. She studied computer sciences and technology and gained PhD degree from the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Since 2005 she has been in Finland working at the University of Oulu. She has two kids; they both were born in Oulu. The family has settled in Oulu very well.

Read more about Zhao´s research about AI-assisted Detection of Biosignals and Human Emotions

Researcher profile of Guoying Zhao

Finnish Academy press release about academy professors

Artificial intelligence research in the University of Oulu

Artificial intelligence understands emotions (Science with Arctic Attitude blog)