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."

Comments

I can just see the possibilities:

[Bollie]

Microsoft Software: We Can Smell Your Fear!

Clippie v2

[peterdaly]

Clippie>> It looks like you are writing a letter.
You>>grr
Clippie>> You are frusterated, would you like my help?
You>>arrrg
Clippie>> I sense you need help, I have migrated your document into the letter template I think you want to you.
You>> stop!
Clippie>> Oh, you are done with your letter? Since you are having trouble, I have taken the liberty of saving and printing you letter for you.
You>> &*^@*(&#$_#(%*&
Clippie>> I sense how difficult this is for you, relax as I help you through the end of the letter writing process. Place an envelope in the printer to print the envelope to send you letter, that's all you have to do, see how easy this is?
...

I can't wait...

-Pete

Re:Clippie v2

[bpfinn]

I hoped it might go something like this:


Clippy>> "It looks like your writing a.... Oh, erm. Never mind". (*Clippy looks terrified and runs off-screen.*)

You>> "THAT'S RIGHT CLIPPY! RUN! RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!"

Hey, that could be fun.

If you're interested

[xmedar]

I'd suggest reading AffectiveComputing by Rosalind Picard from MIT Press, her homepage is here and interview on First Monday and the MIT homepage at MIT

affective?

[BlueFall]

I'd be happy with effective computing... ;)

Dating games, anyone?

[Dark Paladin]

This could be interesting for gamer types. Anyone ever play that current cop-shooting game, where the system has a body sensor that can tell if you're leaning/crouching so you can hide behind objects in a gun fight?

Now, take a dating sim like Sakura Taisen. Not only do you have to choose the right response to the question "Does this dress make me look fat?", but your facial response can have other effects.

For some games, this can be cool. Imagine an RPG where the look on your face determines your character's mood - and your response can then be read as humorous, sarcastic, serious, threatening - who knows. It will put real role playing on the computer into a new light, because you're doing more than reacting with the game, you're interacting.

Then again, the look on my face when I play FPS's look Quake is usually the same one I get when I'm sitting on the toilet, so that might not be a good thing....

Invasion of privacy...

[feloneous cat]

Computer A: Did you know about Jim? He is really getting teed off at me.
Comp. B: How can you tell?

Just what we need, computers that gossip...

Fully functional...

[bahtama]

I can't read this article without thinking about Data and Tasha in The Naked Now.

Tasha: You are fully functional, aren't you?
Data: Yes.
Tasha: How fully?
Data: I am programmed in multiple techniques of pleasure. (And can recognize your emotions, I'm the perfect man for you!)
Tasha: You jewel! That's exactly what I hoped.

MIT Media Lab Affective Computing Home Page

[Seth Finkelstein]

The MIT Media Lab has had a Affective Computing Research Group for a long time. Check out their home page at:

http://affect.media.mit.edu/AC_affect.html, and description

Affective computing is computing that relates to, arises from, or deliberately influences emotions. Our research focuses on creating personal computational systems endowed with the ability to sense, recognize and understand human emotions, together with the skills to respond in an intelligent, sensitive, and respectful manner toward the user and his/her emotions. We are also interested in the development of computers that aid in communicating human emotions, computers that assist and support people in development of their skills of social-emotional intelligence, and computers that "have" emotional mechanisms, as well as the intelligence and ethics to appropriately manage, express, and otherwise utilize these "emotions." Embracing the latter goal of "giving machines emotions" is perhaps the most controversial, and is based on a variety of scientific findings, which include indications that emotion plays a crucial role in enabling a resource-limited system to adapt intelligently to complex and unpredictable situations.

...

We understand that this research may involve gaining access to the emotional life of a person, including information that may be highly personal, intimate, and private. This work is inherently motivated by respect for human feelings, and therefore must respond with respect to a person's desire for privacy. Our default is to protect a person's privacy throughout our research, as well as in the tools we develop. We appreciate the potentially sensitive nature of our work, and feel strongly that the work we do adheres both to the highest ethical standards and the most fundamental human values. We made an effort to detail this policy.

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

Computer Emotion

[Yoda2]

Here are two good links on researchers trying to model emotion using computers.

Lola Cañamero's Emotion Page

Steve Allen's Home Page

Just a year late....

[LittleGuy]

"Look Dave, I can see you're really upset about this.... I honestly think you ought to calm down; take a stress pill and think things over...."

{insert daisy.mid here}

Emotion is thought.

[kmellis]

From the article:

Movellan is part of a growing network of scientists working to disprove long-held assumptions that computers are, by nature, logical geniuses but emotional dunces. The ability to interpret markers for emotion--facial expressions, vocal tones and metabolic responses such as blood pressure--may seem like crude first steps. Yet experts see machine intelligence, unswayed by human frailty and bias, as an eventual advantage. They envision machines that know us better than we know ourselves.

The idea that consciousness could occur outside the context of emotion is a pernicious misconception. It arose from the combination of a greatly oversimplified view of thought and the legacy of dualism.

It is true that what we experience as "emotion" is a subtly different kind of cognition than what we experience as deliberate thought. It's more fundamental, and more closely tied to other physical systems. So I do agree that it makes a certain sort of sense to distinguish "thought" and "emotion". Ultimately, however, both are manifestations of the same fundamental brain activity. They are deeply related and are not in opposition.

We've been spectacularly bad at analysis of our own consciousness. History has shown that much of what we don't notice and so take completely for granted are fundamental and extremely difficult problems; while what we are very aware of and have concentrated upon have proven to be trivial. The predicate calculus, in this context, is trivial.

I've long railed against the cliche of the "unfeeling" thinking machine/being one sees in popular science fiction. Neither Spock nor Data would be able to carry on a meaningful conversation if their thought didn't exist within the context of emotion. The idea that a thinking machine could imitate human consciousness without including human emotion is absurd if examined carefully.

Be that as it may, "affective computing" is only a very minor addition to computing in the context of AI. It's just another form of data acquisition, albeit one that would no doubt be very useful for an AI. None of this stuff we hear about is even remotely close to actual AI; at best it's just "smarter" computing. Real AI will only be achieved when we are able to build (or more properly, "grow") very high-level complex adaptive systems aimed at complex human interaction.

Thanks for Doing LA Times' Job For Them

[GuyMannDude]

I'd suggest reading AffectiveComputing by Rosalind Picard from MIT Press, her homepage is here [mit.edu] and interview on First Monday [firstmonday.dk] and the MIT homepage at MIT [mit.edu]

Thanks for posting this. For the LA Times' article, one gets the feeling that Movellan is leading a one-man renaissance in AI. Like most articles about far-future technologies, the article is heavy on the "gee-whiz" and "what will they think of next?" stuff and light on any sort of in-depth examination of the issues involved. First, I don't understand why the media (newspapers especially) don't take the time to do a thoughtful, in-depth story about non-time-critical issues like Affective Computing. Secondly, I wish that if they were going to do a half-assed job of it, they would at least cite other, more detailed sources of information so interested readers could learn more on their own. Yeah, I suppose someone can do a web search to find this out. And thank god for slashdot where the readers usually know more about the subject matter than the article authors. But it's common curtosy to cite important people in a scientific field. At least it is when writing a scientific paper -- why should the mass media be exempt from this little niceity? Suppose you were a researcher at MIT's program in this field and saw this article. Wouldn't you be kind of pissed off? The LA Times could have replaced that paragraph about the Golem with a paragraph about the MIT program.

I'm troubled by the slipshod coverage that science and technology gets in the mass media. Do the newspaper authors think we don't care to know the details? Do they themselves not care?

GMD

Nice to see

[Salsaman]

Somebody using the word 'affective' properly. No it is not the same as 'effective'.