Affective Computing

Lecture 5:

Dr. Mark Brosnan

2 South: M.J.Brosnan@bath.ac.uk

Picard (1997)

• Affective Computing: Computing that relates to, arises from, or deliberately influences emotions (p.3)

• Recognise emotions

• Express emotions

• ‘Have’ emotions

                                             

Is Mr. Spock intelligent?

• Spock is only rational

• Descarte’s Error (Damasio, 1994)

• Elliot searches unlimited search space to make a rational decision

• Missing ‘somatic markers’ that associate feelings with decisions

Artificial Intelligence?

• AI is like Elliot

• Turing Test (1950; French 2000)

• Jabberwacky.com

• Emotion is required for artificial intelligence (Hofstadter, 1981)

• Emotional Intelligence?

Affective communication

• Social rules extended to computers

• Media Equation (Reeves and Nass, 1996)

• Anthropomorphism

• Mechanomorphism

Recognise Emotions

• Vision to recognise facial expression

• Multimodal

• GSR – polygraph

• Which emotion: happiness, guilt

• ‘Emotional Turing test’

• Person dependent

• Person independent

Criteria for recognition

• Input• Pattern recognition• Reasoning

• Learning• Bias• Output

Express emotions

• Kismet (Breazeal and Scassellati, 2002)

• Emotional expression for communication and social co-ordination

• Emotion for organisation of behaviour (action selection, attention and learning)

• Arbib and Fellous (2004)

http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/humanoid-robotics-group/kismet/kismet.html

• More effective expression than humans

• Human expression identified 50% of the time

• Computer expression identified 70% of the time

• (Elliott, 1997)

• Computers having non-human emotion?

Criteria for expression

• Input• Intentional vs.

spontaneous pathways• Feedback

• Bias exclusion• Social display rules• Output

Have emotions

• Can machines feel?

• How would we know?

Criteria for having emotions

• System has behaviour that appears to arise from emotions

• System has fast ‘primary’ emotional responses to certain inputs

• System can cognitively generate emotions• System can have emotional experience• System’s emotions interact with other

processes (e.g. memory)

Do computers need bodies to have emotions?

• Robot emotions? Arbib (2005)

• Recognition of own emotion

• Recognition of other computer’s emotions

• Consciousness?

• Real or simulation?

• Sci Fi: 2001!

Design questions

• 1. Should computers be allowed to keep their emotions from their designers?

• 2. Should what is considered good and bad be hard-wired or learned?

• 3. Should a computers mood be affected by others’ moods?

• 4. Do computers need negative emotions, anger, fear, misery?

Interacting with Computers

Special Issue (2002, 14(2))

Affective Computing

Scheirer et al. (2002)

• Frustration

• Slow computer game

• Mouse clicking behaviour

Klein and Picard (2002)

• This computer responds to user frustration

• Affect-support agent

• Text and buttons in a GUI

• Demonstrate empathy to support user

• Control 1: Emotions ignored

• Control 2: Vent frustration

Experiment

• Game 1

• Agent intervention

• Game 2

• Affect support agent lead to greater involvement in longer play with Game 2

Picard and Klein (2002)

• Emotion skill needs:

• Emotional self awareness

• Manage emotions

• Self-motivate

• Affect perception

• Empathy

• Experiential emotional needs

Hone (2006)

• Empathetic agents more effective

• Embodied

• Female embodied agents more effective

Tractinsky (2004)

• Affective HCI is difficult to study

• Affective HCI is hard to do

• Design interactive technologies that help users help themselves

Muller (2004)

• 2 Criticisms:

• Computers Are Social Actors (CASA)?

• Other technologies are anthropomorphised too (boats, cars, toys etc)

• Need to better understand emotions

Artefact:

• Potential course work idea is to analyse the affective nature of a piece of technology

• Or to investigate agent mediation of affective states

• Or evaluate the impact of emoticons

• Frustrate users and see what happens!

References:

• Journals:

• Interacting with Computers

• Trends in Cognitive Sciences

• Both available on line

• Book:

• Picard, R. (1997) Affective Computing. MIT Press.

In Future:

• Develop an understanding of anxiety, specifically computer-related anxiety

• Develop an understanding of emotion and the neuropsychology of HCI