Emotion AI: Building Empathetic Machines

Emotion AI is a subset of artificial intelligence that studies and develops systems and devices to recognize, interpret, process, simulate, and react to human emotions. It is an interdisciplinary field spanning computer science, psychology, and cognitive science and represents a step forward in human-computer interaction. Imagine a world in which machines have emotional intelligence, i.e., they can understand the emotional state of humans and adapt their behavior to give appropriate (empathetic) responses to those emotions. Consider these examples: (1) an intelligent tutor detecting students’ affect can realize and respond to a student’s need for support, such as by providing encouraging comments, altering the level of feedback and hints, or adjusting task difficulty; (2) a video game can become more compelling by using players’ affect as input to alter and adjust the gaming environment, such as lighting, music, colors, complexity, or level of companionship; (3) an avatar in a virtual world can mirror a human’s affective expressions and become more believable, likable, trustable, and enjoyable; and, (4) a healthcare application can provide empathetic interventions and motivational support to offer assistance and empower patients to improve their quality of life. The key questions to be answered include: What data is used? What pre-processing is needed? What models would be best for each type of data? How can diverse channels be fused? And, what are the challenges for training and testing models?

Venue

I am grateful to have been invited as a speaker by

A great conversation about Emotion AI and interesting questions from the attendees. Thank you all!

Video (English version)

This is from Gettysburg College talk.

Slides (English version)

This is from Gettysburg College talk.

Video (Spanish version)

This is from Universidad Autonoma del Estado de Morelos talk.

Slides (Spanish version)

This is from Universidad del Chimborazo talk.