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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

I'm not using it at this moment, but in a couple of weeks I'll have a newborn, and I was thinking of taking pictures of him every time he is upset, and then tagging the photo with what ends up being the resolution (feed, change, or nap) and seeing if I could build a classifier that could figure out what he needs just from a picture of his angry face.

Semi-related, but if anyone is using the AWS tools for their AI, please ping me. I'm looking for a speaker for a community event in SF in June. (contact info in profile)

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Suggestion from a new father: you'll have a better chance analyzing your newborn's voice. They have very little control over their facial expression, but there might be some useful information in their crying. Good luck with your new projects!

I was actually planning to do both and see which, if either, produced any useful response. :)

Yeah I agree, you figure out very quickly by the voice/cry what they want.

:) I really like the idea and get ready for the excitement of having a family.

I think the problem you'll end up having is that in some/most cases you are never really certain what the problem was.

Feeding might make the crying stop but you have no way of knowing if the reason for the crying was hunger. Similar problems for sleep, diaper changing, etc.

Every time the crying stops you can never be certain if you just made them temporarily forget about the root problem or if you did properly identify the root cause.

TL/DR my hypothesis after raising my own kids, is that the data will be almost all noise with very little perceptible signal.

I already have a kid, so I know how noisy (pun intended) the data can be. I honestly don't expect to work at all, but it will be fun to try!

I seem to remember nappy (diaper) changes were easy to predict, they were usually proceeded by a bright red face.

Such a cool use case. I'd love to see the results if you could build a classifier for it, though I do wonder how quickly it could identify the symptom.

Hey I'm having a newborn as well and wouldn't mind contributing to the sample set if you make a web form or API for me to post to.

> I was thinking of taking pictures of him every time he is upset, and then tagging the photo

You won't be able to have anywhere near enough data for that.

Unless somewhere out there is a labeled dataset of newborn baby faces, with around 20-30,000 unique samples (the more data, the better).

Your problem isn't really that difficult; it could probably be done with a very simple neural network a few hours of training. If you wanted to be robust, you could hack the ImageNet CNN into something to do this, too.

I would suggest, though, while what you are doing sounds fun - enjoy being a father and deal with this the old fashioned way. It'll probably be more satisfying.

/heck, what do I know - I don't have kids...

imagine a mobile app that parents can use to identify what their angry new born needs, brilliant :)

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