
Ever wonder what your dog is thinking? - brianhur
https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/ever-wondered-what-your-pet-is-thinking
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W-Stool
One of the things I like about my cat (Eleanor Roosevelt, a one eyed Maine
Coon that sat in the local SPCA for 8 months) is that I don't try to
understand her. She does her thing, mostly involving naps and head scratches,
and I just admire her calm and general contentment. Whatever your dog or cat
is thinking, I would suggest you just leave it alone and appreciate the life
those animals live that seem so contented. Who wouldn't want that?

~~~
hnick
I'll disagree, for my dog at least. It is fun to watch the gears turn in his
head, sometimes I see the conclusion he'll get to before he gets there. And
sometimes, since I know him so well, I know where his 'dog logic' will take
him with his flawed world view. It makes a kind of internal sense, when you
don't see the big picture. It's fun and made me realise how far AI is from
even replicating a dog's language-less thought process.

It also makes me think of alien species who might view us the same way.

It has a practical side too, our guy usually slinks off to the couch for
naptime after dinner but a few months back he walked to the office and just
stood in the doorway staring at us. We could instantly tell by his expression
that something was wrong. He turned out to have a grass seed lodged in his
armpit (Which the vet did not find! I had to remove it myself the next day).

It is fun to just watch him sleep and dream, though.

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h2odragon
> In the future, we have talked about analysing a pet’s body in addition to
> its face in order to improve the accuracy.

I think that's vital. Most of "Dog language" and even more of "Cat language"
consists of body language. Things like pose and tension in relation to the
rest of the things in the area at the moment. Dogs and cats are gifted with
the ability to "speak human" enough to be understood tolerably well, but their
language is demonstrably more complicated.

~~~
hnick
And many emotional displays are transient, like stress induced yawns in dogs
(I note stress isn't in their top 5 list but it's common during training and
learning new things).

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mft_
I get that this is mostly for fun, but isn’t there a huge problem here, in
that training the algorithm first requires human interpretation of the
animal’s emotions? Which is a huge uncertainty in the first place?

~~~
me_me_me
Ah yes, I am sure the authors are aware of it. And i am sure they tried to ask
animals first and then settled on human interpretation as second best option.

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mikedilger
I woke up my dog to take a picture of her and see how this AI does. It ranked
her as Unsettled (100%). Yep.

~~~
kortex
My poodle and I are both in the process of waking up. I got her attention to
snap a pic, and it labeled her "Unsettled" too. Yeah, that's about what I feel
before coffee, or in her case, fetch.

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lvturner
Tried this on a few photos of my dog - one of her half asleep, lying on her
back and clearly very relaxed.

It said she was angry.

To be fair, it mis-identified her, and she is also a mixed-breed Asian dog so
I'm not entirely surprised.

But it brings up questions for the future - what happens when AI is wrong but
used as proof of something?

~~~
rsa25519
> But it brings up questions for the future - what happens when AI is wrong
> but used as proof of something?

You bring up a fair point, but I don't think AI is special in this regard.
Imperfect sources of information synthesis (humans, naive algorithms, etc) are
used all the time. Hopefully, AI should simply add one more data point from
which to understand a given situation.

~~~
lvturner
People, presently seem much less willing to challenge what a computer says
however.

I'm wondering if Little Britain's "computer says no"[1] sketch is somewhat
foreshadowing here. It's certainly a situation I've ran in to in several banks
(globally).

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0n_Ty_72Qds](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0n_Ty_72Qds)

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hirundo
So an app on your phone, looking out through a camera on your glasses, could
issue a security alert for very angry or scared people or animals in view. It
seems a natural for Chinese style surveillance nets. Or it could be a learning
tool or a prosthetic for the autistic. Real time AI assisted
seduction/sales/politics/negotiation might become practical. How about an app
for "reading the room".

People with the skills to read the subtleties of others' emotions have a great
advantage. This tech could make some of that skill downloadable from the app
store. Using it to tell if your cat is mad at you seems like the least of it.

