Approach - How did you approach and frame the problem? What work inspired the outcome?

 An approach to the first problem would be using the words as the bridge and take the advantage of google photo search (take visual art as example) to establish the global definition of a word in mathematical expression using some state-of-the art classifier.

An approach to the second problem would be a capturing every perceptional clues of the biophysical signal with sensors to discover the feature (the representation of input data for machine learning) that are related to the expression.