Emotional Intelligence Technology and Autism: Progress and Challenges
Rosalind Picard , Founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group and co-founder and director of the Autism and Communication Technology Initiative, MIT Media Laboratory
| When: | Sep 02, 2010 | 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm |
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| Where: | Maxwell Dworkin G-125 |
Skills of emotional intelligence include the ability to recognize and respond appropriately to another person's emotion, and the ability to know when (not) to display emotion. This talk will describe advances at MIT aimed at giving these skills to technology including mobile devices, robots, agents & traditional computers with focus on
technology to help people who face challenges in understanding and communicating emotion. I will present live demonstrations of current technology, including a system developed w/el Kaliouby to recognize cognitive-affective states in real time from a person's head and facial movements. This technology uses dynamic Bayes nets to compute probabilities that a person looks like he or she is concentrating, interested, agreeing, disagreeing, confused or thinking. These states signal important information such as when is a good time to interrupt, or when might be appropriate to apologize. I will describe some challenges why emotion interpretation is so hard. Several other new affective technologies that facilitate emotion measurement and communication will also be shown, including a new "cardiocam" for computing heart rate with an ordinary webcam and new wearable sensors for measuring emotional arousal. Applications include not only autism, but also research in epilepsy, sleep, PTSD, usability, education, marketing, decision-making theory, customer service, and more.
| Speaker Biography: | Rosalind Picard is founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group and co-founder and director of the Autism and Communication Technology Initiative at the MIT Media Laboratory. She is also co-founder, chief scientist, and chairman of Affectiva, Inc. After receiving a Bachelors in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech with highest honors, Picard joined AT&T Bell Labs where she collaborated on the design of the DSP16 chip and developed new algorithms and architectures for image compression. Picard earned masters and doctorate degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT and joined the MIT faculty in 1991. At MIT she pioneered research on content-based retrieval of image and video, co-developing the Photobook system and introducing the use of new mathematical models and semantic descriptions such as Wold features. In 1997 she authored the book Affective Computing, laying the foundation for a new field of research giving computers skills of emotional intelligence. Picard leads a team of researchers at MIT focused on creating technology to recognize, interpret, and respond intelligently to emotion in multiple modalities including physiology, face, posture and task behavior. |
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| Host: | Krzysztof Gajos |
| Contact: |
Gioia Sweetland
gioia@seas.harvard.edu 617-495-2919 |
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