Dan W

Software Developer

Nick Clegg Looking Algorithmically Sad

Oct 9, 2012

There's a tumblr called Nick Clegg Looking Sad. There are emotion recognition algorithms. I've put one into the other to make Nick Clegg Looking Algorithmically Sad*.

Nick Clegg Looking Sad posts photos of Nick Clegg with captions of why he might be sad. It's quite popular, to the extent that it's the first autocomplete suggestion on Google for the Deputy Prime Minister.

Recently I played with SHORE. It can detect faces in a video or image, along with their age, gender and emotion. But when playing with it I could never get it to detect my face as being sad. So to test it I thought I'd run a corpus of photos through it. What better than a set of images on tumblr widely recognised as sad?

You can see the photographic results at http://nickclegglookingalgosad.tumblr.com/.

In summary:

  • Number of Nick Clegg Looking Sad photos: 64
  • Photos containing detected faces: 54
  • Detected Nick Clegg faces: 51
  • Gender of Nick Clegg: 88% Male
  • Happy Nick Cleggs: 10
  • Angry Nick Cleggs: 5
  • Surprised Nick Cleggs: 1
  • Nick Cleggs looking algorithmically sad: 1

One out of 64. Not bad, for a machine.

* The name comes from some tweets between @deplorableword and @revdancatt