Plenty of people out there have a serious phobia of public speaking and there are tons of other disorders, such as Asperger's, that severely limit a person's ability to handle even simple social interactions. M. Ehsan Hoque, a student at the MIT Media Lab, has made these subjects the focus of her latest project: MACH (My Automated Conversation coacH). At the heart of MACH is a complex system of facial and speech recognition algorithms that can detect subtle nuances in intonation
