AFFECTIVE COMPUTING
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Affective computing is computing that relates to, arises from or deliberately influences emotions. Neurological studies indicate that the role of emotions in human cognition is essential and that emotions play a critical role in rationaldecision-making, perception, human interaction and human intelligence. In the view of increased human computer interaction or HCI it has become important that for proper and full interaction between Humans and Computers, computers should be able to at least recognize and react to different user emotion states.
Emotion is a difficult thing to classify and study fully. Therefore to replicate or to detect emotions in agents is a challenging task. In Human-Human interaction it is often easy to see if a person is angry, happy, or frustrated etc. It is not easy to replicate such an ability in an agent. In this seminar I will be dealing with different aspects of affective computing including a brief study of human emotions, theory and practice related to affective systems, challenges to affective computing and systems which have been developed which and support this type of interaction. I will also be doing a tryst into the area of ethics related to this field as well as implication of computers which will have emotions of their own.
Affective computing is an emerging, interdisciplinary area, addressing a variety of research, methodological, and technical issues pertaining to the integration of affect into human-computer interaction. The specific research areas include recognition of distinct affective states, user interface adaptation and function integration due to changes in user¹s affective state, supporting technologies such as wearable computing for improved affective state detection and adaptation.
INTRODUCTION
Affective computing aims at developing computers with understanding capabilities vastly beyond today’s computer systems. Affective computing is computing that relates to, or arises from, or deliberately influences emotion. Affective computing also involves giving machines skills of emotional intelligence: the ability to recognize and respond intelligently to emotion, the ability to appropriately express (or not express) emotion, and the ability to manage emotions. The latter ability involves handling both the emotions of others and the emotions within one self.
Today, more than ever, the role of computers in interacting with people is of importance. Most computer users are not engineers and do not have the time or desire to learn and stay up to date on special skills for making use of a computer’s assistance. The emotional abilities imparted to computers are intended to help address the problem of interacting with complex systems leading to smoother interaction between the two. Emotional intelligence that is the ability to respond to one’s own and others emotions is often viewed as more important than mathematical or other forms of intelligence. Equipping computer agents with such intelligence will be the keystone in the future of computer agents.
Emotions in people consist of a constellation of regulatory and biasing mechanisms, operating throughout the body and brain, modulating just about everything a person does. Emotion can affect the way you walk, talk, type, gesture, compose a sentence, or otherwise communicate. Thus, to infer a person’s emotion, there are multiple signals you can sense and try to associate with an underlying affective state. Depending on which sensors is available (auditory, visual, textual, physiological, biochemical, etc.) one can look for different patterns of emotion’s influence. The most active areas for machine motion recognition have been in automating facial expression recognition, vocal inflection recognition, and reasoning about emotion given text input about goals and actions. The signals are then processed using pattern recognition techniques like hidden Markov models (HMM’s), hidden decision trees, auto-regressive HMM’s, Support Vector Machines and neural networks.
This post was written by: Rajendra Prasad
Rajendra Prasad is a professional blogger, web designer and front end web developer. Follow him on Facebook
