Slashdot Mirror
Affective Computing: Teaching Machines About Emotion
jbc writes "The L.A. Times is running a story about affective computing, a field in which researchers are programming computers to recognize human emotions through the use of such clues as facial expression, vocal tone, and blood pressure. Some hail it as the dawn of a new era in super-useful machines, while others warn about invasions of privacy."
Two comments:
First, let me state the obvious: There is a big difference between a
computer recognizing emotions and a computer having emotions. The
first problem is not hard to solve. It requires we identify a set of
features that can be used to recognize emotions ("phonemes of
emotional expression" from the article), and feed these features to
some sort of classifier. From a research standpoint, the interesting
part is finding the features that identify emotions. Once we find
those features "discovering" that a computer can recognize these
features is not surprising.
Second, there is some interesting problems in AI. Really! Knowledge
representation, vision, and language design are particular
interesting. But I get very, very angry at people who hype AI to way
beyond what it can do and/or do superficial projects like kismet (Rod
Brooks is good salesman, but he is not a scientist).
This could prevent would-be accidents caused by chronic road-rage drivers. If the system can sense anger/rage from facial and bodily expressions, and driving behaviors like sharp cornering and spontanious accelerating, it could try to calm the driver down by changing music or cooling the cabin. If those measures don't work, the system could then reduce the available power the engine gives out momentarilly. This could also stop a drunk driver from continuing to drive...
$cat