A Fruit Fly Circuit as a Speech Emotion Reservoir

Researchers at ORUK, in collaboration with FlyEM at Janelia, Cambridge, the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, and Google Research, have developed a speech emotion classifier using a 499-neuron circuit from the male fruit fly brain, which is fully connected with 15,865 connections built from 867,344 synaptic contacts. The circuit, mapped by FlyEM, was wired into the classifier using reservoir computing to identify human emotions such as happy and angry from voice inputs.