Understanding the Ambiance of Images: Emotional Visual AI
This project focuses on creating a system that can identify psychological effects of images and environments to passively ameliorate the human state of mind in varying surroundings. Psychologist have theorized that people have adapted to have inclinations towards scenes of nature or animals because living in such environments as a pre-historic human meant survival and successful reproduction. These adaptations occurred before the formations of societies and cultures and are considered to be independent a person’s race or personal past. A wide selection of training data from humans will be collected and used to train the system. We will then evaluate its performance against the analysis of images by human subjects.

I am a junior in 6-3 and I have worked as a UROP in CADLAB and CSAIL. With my project I hope to learn about the effects of the psychological evolution of humans on artistic preferences and artificial intelligence that mimics these preferences. My enthusiasm in this research stems from its combination of the generally unrelated fields of art and technology.