Synthetic intelligence may ultimately assist us perceive when animals are in ache or exhibiting different feelings — at the very least in keeping with researchers recently profiled in Science.

For instance, there’s the Intellipig system being developed by scientists on the College of the West of England Bristol and Scotland’s Rural School, which examines photographs of pigs’ faces and notifies the farmer if there are indicators of ache, illness, or emotional misery.

And a crew on the College of Haifa behind facial recognition software program that’s already been used to assist folks discover misplaced canines is now coaching AI to determine indicators of discomfort on animals’ faces.

These methods depend on human beings to do the preliminary work of figuring out the meanings of various animal behaviors (often based mostly on lengthy remark of animals in numerous conditions), to allow them to prepare the AI on what to search for.

Nonetheless, a researcher on the College of São Paulo has experimented with utilizing photographs of horses’ faces earlier than and after surgical procedure, in addition to earlier than and after taking painkillers, permitting an AI system to make use of deep studying to determine by itself what indicators may point out ache, with an 88% success charge in a current examine.