Dr. Alan Cowen
Dr. Alan Cowen is an applied mathematician and computational emotion scientist who has developed new data-driven methods to study human experience and expression. Prior to founding Hume AI, he was a researcher at Google AI where he helped establish affective computing research efforts. In his paper published in Nature in 2021, Cowen was the first to analyze facial expressions at a sufficient scale and level of precision to draw inferences from their occurrence in everyday life across cultures, analyzing six million natural videos from around the world. In PNAS, Science Advances, and Nature Human Behavior, he has characterized cues of emotion in the face, voice, and music across cultures and even in ancient sculptures. Cowen’s work has given rise to a mathematically-based theory of emotion, semantic space theory, which conceives of emotions as dimensions of a complex, multidimensional space.
