A facial expert is weighing in on the Manti Te'o Girlfriend Hoax Saga. The researcher from Purdue ran the video of Te'o's interview with Katie Couric through a special program to determine if Te'o was telling truth.
Assistant Professor Chris Kowal showed us the program during an interview via Skype Friday. The screen displayed a pie chart showing the emotions Te'o was supposedly feeling during the interview. There was also a graph showing the intensity of those emotions.
We asked Kowal if Te'o was being honest with Couric. "I believe he was, absolutely," Kowal said. "When we look at his interview with Katie Couric and we compare it to his baseline, the emotions he was expressing were sadness and definitely anger and I think he was definitely the victim of a horrible hoax."
Kowal said he established Te'o's baseline after running about 30 clips from previous interviews through the software. Kowal explained the technology looks at 491 points on the face. It takes into account what's going on with the subject's mouth, the angle of the face and when the eyes are opening and closing.
"Here is the particular movement you can see a lot of sadness and anger with a neutral expression as the baseline," Kowal said as he showed us a portion of the interview being run through the software.
Kowal said he doesn't detect any deception from Te'o in the interview. "Is it 100-percent accurate? Probably not," he said. "But for the research that I've done and the use that I've had out of it, I would be very confident to say that it has an accuracy of probably 85 to 90 percent."
