Encouraged by the success of deep learning in a variety of domains, we investigate the suitability and effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) in a domain where deep learning has not yet been used; namely detecting confusion from eye-tracking data. Through experiments with a dataset of user interactions with ValueChart (an interactive visualization tool), we found that RNNs learn a feature representation from the raw data that allows for a more powerful classifier than previous methods that use engineered features. This is evidenced by the stronger performance of the RNN (0.74 0.71 sensitivity specificity), as compared to a Random Forest classifier (0.51 0.70 sensitivity specificity), when both are trained on an un-augmented dataset. However, using engineered features allows for simple data augmentation methods to be used. These same methods are not as effective at augmentation for the feature representation learned from the raw data, likely due to an inability to match the temporal dynamics of the data.
 Deep learning based approaches to facial analysis and video analysis have recently demonstrated high performance on a variety of key tasks such as face recognition, emotion recognition and activity recognition. In the case of video, information often must be aggregated across a variable length sequence of frames to produce a classification result. Prior work using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for emotion recognition in video has relied on temporal averaging and pooling operations reminiscent of widely used approaches for the spatial aggregation of information. Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have seen an explosion of recent interest as they yield state-of-the-art performance on a variety of sequence analysis tasks. RNNs provide an attractive framework for propagating information over a sequence using a continuous valued hidden layer representation. In this work we present a complete system for the 2015 Emotion Recognition in the Wild (EmotiW) Challenge. We focus our presentation and experimental analysis on a hybrid CNN-RNN architecture for facial expression analysis that can outperform a previously applied CNN approach using temporal averaging for aggregation. Despite growing research interest, emotion understanding for user-generated videos remains a challenging problem. Major obstacles include the diversity and complexity of video content, as well as the sparsity of expressed emotions. For the first time, we systematically study large-scale video emotion recognition by transferring deep feature encodings. In addition to the traditional, supervised recognition, we study the problem of zero-shot emotion recognition, where emotions in the test set are unseen during training. To cope with this task, we utilize knowledge transferred from auxiliary image and text corpora. A novel auxiliary Image Transfer Encoding (ITE) process is proposed to efficiently encode and generate video representation. We also thoroughly investigate different configurations of convolutional neural networks. Comprehensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.