Lecture: "Emotional Intelligence Technology and Autism"

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Date/Time:Monday, 21 Sep 2009 at 1:00 pm
Location:Alliant Energy-Lee Liu Auditorium, Howe Hall
Cost:Free
Contact:
Phone:515-294-9934
Channel:Lecture Series
Categories:Lectures
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Rosalind Picard is the author of Affective Computing, a book instrumental in starting a new field by that name. She is teaching machines to sense and respond more intelligently to people's emotions and to behave in ways that make more expressive communication possible.

Picard is founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory, codirector of the Things That Think Consortium, and leader of the new and growing Autism Communication Technology Initiative at MIT. She holds a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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 live demonstrations of current technology, including a system developed with el Kaliouby to recognize 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 who face challenges in reading real-time social-emotional cues. I will describe several other new affective technologies that facilitate emotion measurement and communication, and describe applications in autism.

Part of the Women in Human Computer Interaction Series and the Women in STEM Series.