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The purpose of this paper is to explore uncertainty inherent in emotion recognition technologies and the consequences resulting from that phenomenon.

The paper is a general overview of the concept; however, it is based on a meta-analysis of multiple experimental and observational studies performed over the past couple of years.

The main finding of the paper might be summarized as follows: there is uncertainty inherent in emotion recognition technologies, and the phenomenon is not expressed enough, not addressed enough and unknown by the users of the technology.

Practical implications of the study are formulated as postulates for the developers, users and researchers dealing with the technologies of automatic emotion recognition.

As technologies that recognize emotions are becoming more and more common, and perhaps more decisions influencing people lives are to come in the next decades, the trustworthiness of the technology is important from a scientific, practical and ethical point of view.

Studying uncertainty of emotion recognition technologies is a novel approach and is not explored from such a broad perspective before.

The purpose of this paper is to answer the question whether it is possible to recognise the gender of a web browser user on the basis of keystroke dynamics and mouse movements.

An experiment was organised in order to track mouse and keyboard usage using a special web browser plug-in. After collecting the data, a number of parameters describing the users’ keystrokes, mouse movements and clicks were calculated for each data sample. Then several machine learning methods were used to verify the stated research question.

The experiment showed that it is possible to recognise males and females on the basis of behavioural characteristics with an accuracy exceeding 70 per cent. The best results were obtained while using Bayesian networks.

The first limitation of the study was the restricted contextual information, i.e. neither the type of web page browsed nor the user activity was taken into account. Another is the narrow scope of the respondent group. Future work should focus on gathering data from more users covering a wider age range and should consider the context.

Automatic gender recognition could be used in profiling a user to create personalised websites or as an additional feature in automatic identification for security reasons. It might be also considered as a confirmation of declared gender in web-based surveys.

As not all users perceive personalised ads and websites as beneficial, this application requires the analysis of a user perspective to provide value to the consumer without privacy violation.

Behavioural characteristics, such as mouse movements and keystroke dynamics, have already been used for user authentication and emotion recognition, but applying these data to gender recognition is an original idea.

This study responds to Agnieszka Landowska’s paper about the lack of accuracy in emotion recognition.

The approach is purely theoretical. The paper also refers to empirical studies.

The author first elaborates on Landowska’s “postulates” (normative guidelines) and then shortly expands on how virtual chatbots such as “AI therapists” pose considerable challenges to emotion recognition algorithms as well.

This viewpoint’s value is to elaborate and expand on an ongoing discussion on emotion recognition technologies.