Seminars will be held in the Lecture Theatre 1 - William Gates Building, Computer Laboratory at 4.15pm

	for the research groups' seminars:  Networks & OS seminars  Security seminars  Logic and Semantics seminars  weekly timetable

Toward Machines with Emotional Intelligence

Rosalind W. Picard ^*

MIT Media Lab

The skills of "emotional intelligence" have been argued to be among the most important for people, even more important than mathematical and verbal intelligences. Emotional intelligence includes the ability to recognize emotion - to see if you're irritated or annoyed someone, pleased or displeased them, bored or interested them. It includes the ability to know when to show emotion (or not), and how you should respond to another's emotions, as well as many other skills.

In this talk, I'll describe how we're giving computers new skills of intelligence, specifically the ability to recognize and respond appropriately to human emotion. I'll show examples of systems that try to assess interest, frustration, stress, and a range of other states that occur when interacting with computers. These systems involve new kinds of sensing for desktop, wearable, and other ubiquitous interfaces, as well as the development of new pattern recognition and machine learning algorithms for drawing inferences from noisy multimodal data.

Current applications include human learning, usability feedback, health behaviour change, and human-robot interaction.

*
Rosalind W. Picard is founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Laboratory and is co-director of the Things That Think Consortium. Prior to completing her doctorate at MIT, she was a Member of the Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories where she designed VLSI chips for digital signal processing and developed new methods of image compression and analysis.