Your Face is Muted
Tilman Dingler, Zhanna Sarsenbayeva, Eylül Ertay, Hao Huang and Melanie Huang
Can you change someone’s mind?
Connecting and empathising with someone is the key to meaningful conversations – especially when it’s around critical topics like climate change, human rights and mental health advocacy. When we have these conversations, it’s important to be able to read faces and empathise with people’s emotions and point of view. What happens when we shift these conversations from in-person into the digital realm? Created by University of Melbourne students and researchers over zoom from different sides of the globe during the 2020 lockdown, this work explores what we lose when the connection is patchy and tests how much we rely on facial cues to communicate with our conversation partner.
Is human connection still possible through a patchy curtain of technology?
Dr Tilman Dingler is a computer scientist and researcher who builds technologies that peak into their users’ minds. Whether sleepy, alert, bored, or annoyed, what if computers picked up on our cognitive states and adapted to them? Tilman uses data from smartphones, wearables, and novel sensors to model and enhance our abilities to communicate, process information, and learn more effectively.
Dr Zhanna Sarsenbayeva is a Doreen Thomas Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Computing and Information Systems at University of Melbourne. Zhanna’s research focuses on making technology more accessible for people with permanent impairments. She also uses smartphone sensors to study human behaviour in different environments.
Hao Huang is a Masters Student of Information Technology with a great passion for new technology. He is interested in turning ideas into production and doing things in different ways. Hao enjoys connecting people with their smart devices in more intelligent ways.
Eylül Ertay is a fresh UniMelb graduate and an incoming Masters student at Cornell Tech, currently working as a Junior Data Scientist. She is a human-centric techie with a passion for creating technology shaped by social theory. She also enjoys using computing as a medium to express creativity and design.
Mel Huang is an interactive designer and developer for the arts, culture & education sectors collaborating with institutions such as Dark Mofo, NGV and Art Gallery NSW. She is the founder of Technicolor, bringing technical education to creative practitioners, and a creative coding lecturer at RMIT.