Device Developed To Help Socially Challenged

An anonymous reader writes "A device from MIT Media Labs that can pick up on people's emotions is being developed to help people with autism relate to those around them. It will alert its autistic user if the person they are talking to starts showing signs of getting bored or annoyed." From the article: "The 'emotional social intelligence prosthetic' device, which El Kaliouby is constructing along with MIT colleagues Rosalind Picard and Alea Teeters, consists of a camera small enough to be pinned to the side of a pair of glasses, connected to a hand-held computer running image recognition software plus software that can read the emotions these images show. If the wearer seems to be failing to engage his or her listener, the software makes the hand-held computer vibrate."

Comments

Re:Intelligent Design

[Moulton]

My position on Intelligent Design is that it should be taught in the Engineering Curriculum, so that our engineered products are intelligently designed.

Consider, for example, the design of the God Function in so-called God Games. The God Function moderates the relationship between the human player (God) and the simulated characters inside the system model.

An intelligently designed God Function will yield an intriguing and persistent Life Drama within the framework of the World Simulation.

Which brings me around to a question for you, Don. How did you come to your insights on how to intelligently design the God Function in your various Sim franchises?

And more to the point, do you believe that it would be worthwhile to pass your insights on to the next generation of system designers?

After all, if your own system design meets the test of intelligence, wouldn't you want it to survive into future generations?

It would astonish me if you didn't believe in teaching the principle of intelligent design when designing systems that mimicked the dynamics of the real world.

The Discovery Center

[Moulton]

Are you referring to the Discovery Center at the Boston Museum of Science?

I've been affiliated with them for about 18 years now.

At the Discovery Center, my main role is to supervise the Puzzle Activity.

The Discovery Center promotes the development of Scientific Intelligence and Insight, through Discovery Activities. Puzzle Solving is just one of the many activities we employ there.

One of the reasons I am affiliated with the Discovery Center at the Boston Museum of Science is that we are free there to address subjects that are not part of the regular public school curriculum.

This includes a healthy dose of functional reasoning.

But I digress. I suspect that my actual activities are nothing like those you would like to be able to ascribe to me.

What puzzles me, Don, is why you evidently desire to ascribe to me practices and beliefs that I am largely unfamiliar with. Is there some reason that it's important to you to falsely characterize other people?

The only thing about the Theory of Evolution that troubles me is its silence on how the DNA code arose in the first place. Probably this gap will eventually be filled in by some other theory. One of the open questions is whether DNA-based life arose on Earth, or arrived here via cosmic dust from some other world. It would surprise me if the answer to this question came out of Darwinian Science. More likely it will come out of the field of Molecular Biology or Space Science. Still, it's possible that we will discover some arcane forms of life in the ocean's depths that yield some insights into how nucleic acids came to their current role in Cellular Biology.

And yes, I really believe that systems designers should reason carefully about their designs, so as to construct robust and functional systems.

There is nothing quite so disappointing as a poorly designed system, whether it be a living system, an ecosystem, a civilization, or a computer game.

The Joy of Being Misunderstood

[Moulton]

I hope you are enjoying being misunderstood, Don.

It makes for an amusing storyline, doesn't it?

Think of Clint Eastwood's memorable line, "I'm afraid you've misjudged me."

It's great sport to be misunderstood and misjudged, isn't it Don?

Let's continue trading misunderstandings, misconceptions, and misjudgments until we've throughougly entertained ourselves to the point of utter banality.

Then we can distill our sobering experiences into simulated dramas full of realistic annoyance, frustration, and exasperation, in strict accordance with Clancy's Theorem.