I’m in charge of designing a new lab for a course we teach at our university. Students will attend multiple sessions in which they will learn applied data science / machine learning. My question is what would be a fun thing to predict from videos of humans?

In the first session, they will collect video data using some RealSense RGBD depth cameras we have in the lab; we will record people, but the details aren’t set yet. In the second session, they will work on labeling and cleaning the data they collected, prepare it, and work on loading it into different ML frameworks (current plan is scikit-learn and TF). We will then aggregate all that data into a decently sized dataset with ground truth. In the third session, students should use that dataset, build a model, and complete a small assignment.

Over the years, we should get a substantial amount of examples (the course is experiencing exponential growth at the moment), which would make this big enough to train deep networks on it. I think that would be a fun lab for a university student.

The current idea is to give people a personality test (big5) before recording the video, and then predict traits like extroversion from people’s posture.

I’m not 100% sold on this though. So if anybody has suggestions, I’d love to hear them!