UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — James Wang, distinguished professor in the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology, is the recipient of an Amazon Research Award for the fourth consecutive year.
Wang will receive gift funding of $80,000 and Amazon Web Services (AWS) promotional credits in the amount of $20,000 to support his project, “Affective and Social Interaction between Human and Intelligent Machine in Daily Activities.’’ The funding will enable his team to advance machine learning-based emotion modeling that is geared toward enhancing the interaction between humans and artificial intelligence (AI) in day-to-day activities.
“I am thrilled and immensely grateful that Amazon Research Awards continues to recognize and support our fundamental research in an area that has high potential societal benefit,” said Wang.
According to Wang, many applications could benefit if robots were able to better communicate with humans; for example, if a household robot sensed the sadness of a child, it could tell a story to cheer the child up.
“Robots today mostly follow humans’ orders,” said Wang. “While they become more and more capable of doing things, their ability to understand human partners is limited. This restricts how robots communicate with humans when they work or play together.”
In 2018, Wang became the first Penn State researcher to earn an Amazon Research Award. In 2019, he and fellow IST faculty member Xinyu Xing were presented with Amazon Research Awards, and last year he and Rui Zhang, assistant professor of computer science and engineering, earned awards.
Wang’s research group aims to advance knowledge related to the analysis, management and making sense of large and complex visual data. He and his collaborators have pioneered computational modeling of visual aesthetics, predicting evoked emotions from visual content and automated recognition of bodily expression of emotion.
Amazon Research Awards provide unrestricted funds and AWS promotional credits to academic researchers for one of the following five topics: AI for Information Security; Alexa Fairness in AI; AWS AI; AWS Automated Reasoning; and Robotics. Award recipients have access to more than 300 Amazon public datasets and can utilize AWS artificial intelligence and machine learning services and tools. Wang is among 74 award recipients who represent 51 universities in 17 countries selected in the current cycle.