The nation’s pioneer land-grant university, Michigan State University (MSU) is home to nationally ranked and recognized academic, residential college, and service-learning programs.

Among the fastest-growing academic programs at MSU, the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) hosts nine research laboratories and equips students with practical skills that enable them to adapt to changing technology.

Dr. Mohammad Ghassemi is an associate professor in the computer science department at MSU. Dr. Ghassemi researches human health and behavior using machine learning, and is the director of a study at MSU in which the behavior and interactions between small groups of individuals are examined.

Our Using Sensors to Study Human Behavior system transforms the laboratory dedicated to this study into a “smart” meeting space. Human movement is captured using cameras, dialogue is collected using microphones, and an electroencephalogram (EEG) is used to study brain activity.

The collected data is used to train machine learning algorithms, detect anomalies in human conversation, and track eye movements using strategically mounted cameras.

The data is streamed to our website (called The Data Hub) where it is viewed and analyzed by researchers and stored for later research and analysis. Additionally, The Data Hub allows researchers to set event triggers in response to data. Triggers can be as simple as a text notification or as complex as a change in the environment of the lab.

The lab contains an EEG as well as multiple cameras and a microphone connected to Raspberry Pis that stream data to our remote server running MySQL. The Data Hub is written in Python using the Flask web framework.