Aleix Martinez
Professor | Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering | The Ohio State University
Columbus, OH, UNITED STATES
Engineering expert, with a penchant for affective computing and computer learning
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 (4)
Research
Writing and Editing
Education/Learning
Program Development
Areas of Expertise (11)
Cognitive Science
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Engineering
Face Recognition
Object Recognition
Computational Linguistics
Computational Neuroscience
Computer Vision
Pattern Recognition
Computer Science
Machine Learning
Links (2)
Media Appearances (5)
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...
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.
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...
We Asked Scientists: Just How Punchable Is Martin Shkreli’s Face?
ThinkProgress
2016-02-10
But why is Shkreli’s face so punchable? Plenty of hated individuals find their appearances ridiculed by the masses, but it’s rare to see such a specific yet universal reaction. Is there a scientific explanation for this phenomenon? Does Shkreli’s face match his personality due to fate alone? Has the evil within distorted his appearance without? To find out, I spoke with Lisa Barrett, a professor at Northeastern University who specializes in the psychology of emotion, and Aleix Martinez, a professor at Ohio State University who studies facial expressions and the emotions that drive them...
Happily disgusted? Scientists map facial expressions for 21 emotions
The Guardian
2014-03-31
Dr Aleix Martinez, from Ohio State University in the US, said: "We've gone beyond facial expressions for simple emotions like happy or sad. We found a strong consistency in how people move their facial muscles to express 21 categories of emotions. "That is simply stunning. That tells us that these 21 emotions are expressed in the same way by nearly everyone, at least in our culture."...
Recent Research (5)
Ask a scientist about the link between facial expressions, language and cognition
The Ohio State University2016-04-28
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...
Researchers pinpoint part of the brain that recognizes facial expressions
The Ohio State University2016-04-19
“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...
The ‘Not Face’ is a universal part of language, study suggests
The Ohio State University2016-03-28
“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...
Computer Maps 21 Distinct Emotional Expressions—Even “Happily Disgusted”
The Ohio State University2014-03-31
“We’ve gone beyond facial expressions for simple emotions like ‘happy’ or ‘sad.’ We found a strong consistency in how people move their facial muscles to express 21 categories of emotions,” said Aleix Martinez, a cognitive scientist and associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Ohio State. “That is simply stunning. That tells us that these 21 emotions are expressed in the same way by nearly everyone, at least in our culture.”...
A New Way To Help Computers Recognize Patterns
The Ohio State University2006-01-24
Aleix Martinez, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Ohio State, explained what all these areas of research have in common: pattern recognition. He designs computer algorithms to replicate human vision, so he studies the patterns in shape and color that help us recognize objects, from apples to friendly faces. But much of today's research in other areas comes down to finding patterns in data -- identifying the common factors among people who develop a certain disease, for example...
