Abstract
Years ago, my students at MIT and I began to create wearable sensors and algorithms for recognizing emotion. We designed studies to elicit emotion, gathered data, and developed signal processing and machine learning methods to see what insights could be reliably obtained – especially studying common emotions (in computing) such as frustration and stress. In this talk I will highlight several of the most surprising findings during this adventure. These include new insights about the “true smile of happiness,” discovering that regular cameras (and your smartphone, even in your handbag) can compute vital signals, finding electrical signals on the wrist that give insight into deep brain activity, and learning surprising implications of wearable sensing for autism, anxiety, depression, sleep, memory consolidation, epilepsy, and more. I’ll also describe our next focus: how might these new capabilities help prevent the future #1 disease burden?
Speaker Bio
Rosalind W. Picard is founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the MIT Media Laboratory, co-founder of Affectiva, which delivers technology to help measure and communicate emotion, used by over 1/3 of the Global Fortune 100 companies, and co-founder and Chief Scientist of Empatica, improving lives with clinical quality wearable sensors and analytics. Picard is the author of over two hundred peer-reviewed scientific articles. She is known internationally for authoring the book, Affective Computing, which helped launch the field by that name. Picard holds a Bachelors in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Masters and Doctorate degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. In 2005 she was named a Fellow of the IEEE for contributions to image and video analysis and affective computing.
Picard is an active inventor with nearly two dozen patents: her group’s inventions have been twice named to “top ten” lists, including the New York Times Magazine’s Best Ideas of 2006 for their Social Cue Reader, used in autism, and 2011’s Popular Science Top Ten Inventions for a Mirror that Monitors Vital Signs. CNN named her in 2015 one of seven “Tech Superheroes to Watch.” Picard’s lab at MIT develops technologies to better understand, predict, and regulate emotion, including machine-learning based analytics that work with wearables and smartphones, with applications aimed at helping people with autism, epilepsy, depression/anxiety, migraine, pain, and more.