Aleix Martinez

Professor | Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering The Ohio State University

  • Columbus OH

Engineering expert, with a penchant for affective computing and computer learning

Contact

The Ohio State University

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Biography

Aleix M. Martinez is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The Ohio State University (OSU), where he is the founder and director of the the Computational Biology and Cognitive Science Lab. He is also affiliated with the Department of Biomedical Engineering and to the Center for Cognitive Science where he is a member of the executive committee. Prior to joining OSU, he was affiliated with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Purdue University and with the Sony Computer Science Lab. He has served as an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, IEEE Transaction on Affective Computing, Computer Vision and Image Understanding, and Image and Vision Computing. He has been an area chair for many top conferences and was Program Chair for CVPR 2014 in his hometown, Columbus, OH. He is also a member of the Cognition and Perception study section at NIH and has served as reviewer for numerous NSF, NIH as well as other national and international funding agencies.

Dr. Martinez research has been covered by numerous national media outlets, including CNN, The Huffington Post, Time Magazine, CBS News and NPR, as well as intrernational outets, including The Guardian, Spiegel, El Pais and Le Monde. A selection of recent stories is available here.

Industry Expertise

Research
Writing and Editing
Education/Learning
Program Development

Areas of Expertise

Cognitive Science
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Engineering
Face Recognition
Object Recognition
Computational Linguistics
Computational Neuroscience
Computer Vision
Pattern Recognition
Computer Science
Machine Learning

Media Appearances

This Is How Your Brain Recognizes Other People's Facial Expressions

TechTimes  

2016-04-22

"That suggests that our brains decode facial expressions by adding up sets of key muscle movements in the face of the person we are looking at," said cognitive scientist and professor Aleix Martinez of electrical and computer engineering at OSU.

Martinez's team placed 10 participants under fMRI machine wherein they were showed 1,000 facial expressions that corresponded to seven emotional categories, namely disgusted, happily disgusted, fearfully disgusted, happily surprised, fearfully surprised, angrily surprised and sadly fearful...

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How the brain identifies other people's feelings

CBS  tv

2016-04-20

"That suggests that our brains decode facial expressions by adding up sets of key muscle movements in the face of the person we are looking at," study author Aleix Martinez said in a university news release. Martinez is a cognitive scientist and professor of electrical and computer engineering at Ohio State.

"Humans use a very large number of facial expressions to convey emotion, other non-verbal communication signals and language," Martinez said.

"Yet, when we see someone make a face, we recognize it instantly, seemingly without conscious awareness. In computational terms, a facial expression can encode information, and we've long wondered how the brain is able to decode this information so efficiently," he explained.

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Bitch Face Is a Universal Language, Researchers Say

Elle  

2016-04-04

The scientists found the Not Face was often used in lieu of words across the different languages. "To our knowledge, this is the first evidence that the facial expressions we use to communicate negative moral judgment have been compounded into a unique, universal part of language," said Aleix Martinez, an Ohio State University professor of electrical and computer engineering and the researcher behind the study...

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Recent Research

Ask a scientist about the link between facial expressions, language and cognition

The Ohio State University

2016-04-28

On Friday, April 29, Aleix Martinez will answer questions in a live online Q&A session on the social media site reddit. He'll discuss how he identified the "not face"—a universal expression of disapproval—as well as the implications of his research for human cognition and the origin of language...

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Researchers pinpoint part of the brain that recognizes facial expressions

The Ohio State University

2016-04-19

“That suggests that our brains decode facial expressions by adding up sets of key muscle movements in the face of the person we are looking at,” said Aleix Martinez, a cognitive scientist and professor of electrical and computer engineering at Ohio State...

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The ‘Not Face’ is a universal part of language, study suggests

The Ohio State University

2016-03-28

“To our knowledge, this is the first evidence that the facial expressions we use to communicate negative moral judgment have been compounded into a unique, universal part of language,” said Aleix Martinez, cognitive scientist and professor of electrical and computer engineering at The Ohio State University...

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