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Something in theway she movesHow do you tell ifthe person walkingtowards you is aman or woman?Getting it wrongcan be incrediblyembarrassing!Hairstyle? Men have ponytails.Women have short hair.Body shape? What if they are wearingbaggy clothing?Is there actually any feature that isa reliable way to tell?Research by Kevin Shan at Queen Mary,University of London has shown thatcomputers can be taught to identifywhether a person is male or female,but in a surprising way. When we walk,our limbs act like pendulums, and thelength and swing of the pendulum largelydetermines our individual pattern ofmovement. This swing is different for boysand girls; it’s due to the difference in ourbody shapes and skeletons. By showing thecomputer examples of how lots of peoplewalk the computer can be taughtto recognise the difference.All the clues point to…To be even better at making the judgmentwe can combine this with computer facialanalysis techniques that are trained torecognise the sorts of shapes of male andfemale faces. This bringing together ofdifferent clues to solve the problem iscalled ‘data fusion’. It turns out it is a keyidea in saving the lives of babies too(see page 12).So if you have ever been in thatembarrassing situation when it dawns onyou have been chatting up a woman notthe man (or vice versa) you thought youwere talking to, at least you know theemotional robots of the future won’t havethe same problem.DATA FUSIONData fusion can go even further combiningthese and other visual clues such as bodytemperature, the direction people arelooking, or even how long a person hasbeen standing still. From this set of cluesa computer can, after it’s been trained andknows the patterns to look for, decide ifthere is suspicious behaviour going on andalert the appropriate authorities.6Passionate about computer science?www.cs4fn.org