What is aiMotions ?

aiMotions is a 4-year project (2024-2028) funded by the French National Research Agency (ANR). It aims at developing a new generation of artificial intelligence (AI) methods for the analysis of food-related emotions. The project will be carried out by a consortium of 3 partners ( ICB, IETR and CSGA) from the academic sector.

The main scientific objective of aiMotions is to decipher how food elicits emotions to better understand the mechanisms underlying food choice behavior, thanks to an unprecedented joint contribution of Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, and Affective Computing to Food Science.

To achieve success, aiMotions addresses the challenge to develop a new AI-based framework to capture and analyze emotional responses elicited by food. We hypothesize that (H1) Cameras can replace wearable sensors (heart rate, pupillometry, facial expressions) and reliably capture emotional responses without being intrusive; (H2) Computer Vision and Affective Computing boosted with Artificial Intelligence can accurately extract implicit emotional cues and analyze their evolution over time; (H3) The joint use of this new AI-based framework and other traditional explicit/implicit measures can pave the way for unprecedented studies and insights in Food Sciences.

aiMotions targets 3 scientific objectives: (O1) Release an open multimodal dataset of emotional responses elicited by images or odors, (O2) Design an end-to-end AI-based framework that targets automated analysis of emotions and derive a lightweight easy-to-use version compatible with a personal computer, (O3) Conduct a series of disruptive studies in Food Sciences implementing this AI-based framework possibly coupled with physiological or behavioral measures to gather more precise information on food-elicited emotions and better understand the underlying mechanisms.