We’ve been running controlled trials with real-time facial affect analysis using nothing but a standard 720p webcam — no IR sensors, no EEG caps, no chest straps. The goal? Detect emotional valence and arousal with enough accuracy to be useful in high-stakes environments: remote proctoring, telehealth triage, UX research. Most open-source pipelines fail here because they treat emotion as a static classification problem. We treat it as a dynamic signal. Our stack uses a lightweight RetinaFace for detection, followed by a pruned EfficientNet-B0 fine-tuned on dynamic expressions from the AFEW and SEED datasets — not just static FER2013 junk. Temporal smoothing via a 1D causal CNN on top of softmax outputs reduces jitter and improves response latency under variable lighting. The real breakthro

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Anxious days, sleepless nights for young Iranians in Hong Kong as war rages on

Life for Hong Kong-based Iranian biomedical researcher Behzad Nasiri Ahmadabadi is filled with anxiety as he spends each day waiting for a call from his family that may not come amid the conflict in the Middle East. The stress is similar for Iranian student Ali*, who spends his days scrolling through news reports from across the world to piece together events on the ground and lies awake at night thinking about what they mean. Young Iranians in Hong Kong are dealing with the conflict in a...