Rosalind W. Picard to give the 2007 Pascal Lectures
We are pleased to announce that the 2007 Pascal Lectures on Christianity and the University will be given by Rosalind W. Picard.
Lecture abstract
At Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), we are leaders in research to give today's robots and other machines emotional skills, including the ability to recognize and respond appropriately to peoples' emotions, to display emotions, and to reason using emotion-like mechanisms. This talk will include a real-time demonstration of some of the latest emotion-skilled technology, which is being used to help people on the autism spectrum. The talk will also address these questions: "What is the difference between people and machines once you give machines emotional abilities?" and "Isn't emotion the last thing that separates people from computers?"
Seminar abstract
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 robots, mobile devices, wearable & traditional platforms. I will demonstrate a new system (developed w/el Kaliouby) to recognize complex cognitive-affective states in real time from a person's head and facial movements. This technology can discern when the user looks like he or she is concentrating or interested, agreeing or disagreeing, confused, or thinking, states that help inform when is a good time to interrupt or otherwise adapt to someone. A wearable version of this system is currently under development for helping people with autism who have trouble reading social-emotional cues. I will present several applications of these technologies as well as discuss several ethical questions they raise.
Biography of Rosalind W. Picard
Picard holds a bachelors in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and masters and doctorate degrees, both in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, from the MIT. An MIT faculty member since 1991, she was previously a member of the technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories. She was honoured as a fellow of the IEEE in 2005.
Author of over a hundred peer-reviewed scientific articles, Professor Picard has pioneered research in affective computing and in content-based image and video retrieval. Her award-winning book, Affective Computing, (MIT Press, 1997) lays the groundwork for giving machines the skills of emotional intelligence. She and her students have designed and developed a variety of new sensors, algorithms, and systems for sensing, recognizing, and responding respectfully to human affective information, with applications in human and machine learning, health, and human-computer interaction. She presently serves on the editorial board of The Journal of Personalization Research, and on the advisory committee for the National Science Foundation's division of Computers in Science and Engineering in the U.S.A., and has been a consultant for Apple, AT&T, BT, HP, i.Robot, and Motorola. Often a keynote conference speaker, her group's achievements have been featured in The New York Times, The London Independent, Scientific American Frontiers, Time, Vogue, New Scientist, and the BBC.