Rosalind Picard , Ph.D.

Emotional Intelligence Technology and Autism

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 demonstrate advances at MIT aimed at giving several of these skills to technology including mobile devices, robots, agents, wearable & traditional computers. I will present a live demonstration of current technology, developed w/el Kaliouby, to recognize complex cognitive-affective states in real time from a person's head and facial movements. This technology computes 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 for interrupting. A wearable version of this system is being developed for helping people with autism who often face challenges reading social-emotional cues. I will describe several other new affective technologies that facilitate emotion measurement and communication, and highlight social, ethical, and philosophical issues surrounding their use.