London – When Londoner Chelsea Battle first met her cavapoo Peanut, it was love at first sight.
“He’s my son,” she told CBS News, calling her bond with her dog “one of the most important relationships of my life.”
Chelsea adopted Peanut at the height of the crisis. COVID-19 pandemic.
“I think it’s really important to understand that dogs have different personalities and you need to find the one that suits you best,” Chelsea said. “I was lucky.”
Their bond is strong and choose a dog or another pet often comes down to a hunch. But computer scientists at the University of East London hope to take some of the risk out of the process. They use artificial intelligence to predict people’s personality types. individual dogsso that they can be better adapted to humans.
“These personality types are defined based on behavioral attributes, not the breed or gender of the dog,” Dr. Mohammad Amirhosseini, a lecturer in computer science and digital technology at the university, told CBS News.
Using behavioral recordings of more than 70,000 dogs from the University of Pennsylvania, British researchers developed an AI algorithm to classify dogs into five groups – you might even call them personality types.
“Our best-performing model achieved 99% accuracy, which is incredible,” Amirhosseini said.
They found that dogs can be classified into one of the following categories:
- Excitable and hyper attached
- Anxious and fearful
- Distant and predatory
- Responsive and assertive
- Quiet and pleasant.
With this information in hand, researchers hope to eventually be able to predict the best specific dogs – not just breeds – for a range of tasks from drug detection to guiding the blind, and maybe even cuddling children.
Currently, more than half of dogs trained for specific jobs, such as security or guide work, fail their programs, according to the American Kennel Club.
“If we have an idea in advance of the dog’s personality,” Amirhosseini said, “we can select the right dog for the right job.”
He said he hopes that one day, AI technology will be readily available to help families looking to adopt a dog find the perfect fit. Currently, about half of dogs rescued from shelters in the United States end up being returned to their owners, and behavioral problems are very often cited as a factor.
The researchers hope that as they develop the AI tool, it will help create more successful adoptions.
