Affective Computing (The MIT Press) by Rosalind W. W. Picard (PDF)

Description

According to Rosalind Picard, if we want computers to be genuinely intelligent and to interact naturally with us, we must give computers the ability to recognize, understand, even to have and express emotions.The latest scientific findings indicate that emotions play an essential role in decision making, perception, learning, and more—that is, they influence the very mechanisms of rational thinking. Not only too much, but too little emotion can impair decision making. According to Rosalind Picard, if we want computers to be genuinely intelligent and to interact naturally with us, we must give computers the ability to recognize, understand, even to have and express emotions.Part 1 of this book provides the intellectual framework for affective computing. It includes background on human emotions, requirements for emotionally intelligent computers, applications of affective computing, and moral and social questions raised by the technology. Part 2 discusses the design and construction of affective computers. Although this material is more technical than that in Part 1, the author has kept it less technical than typical scientific publications in order to make it accessible to newcomers. Topics in Part 2 include signal-based representations of emotions, human affect recognition as a pattern recognition and learning problem, recent and ongoing efforts to build models of emotion for synthesizing emotions in computers, and the new application area of affective wearable computers.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review — Norman Weinstein, “Technology Review”” Compelling. . . . Picard convincingly demonstrates that computers can also be designed to think about feelings and how to rationally act in light of them. . . . A groundbreaking preface to a plausible direction in computer design.” — Norman Weinstein, “Technology Review”& quot; Compelling. . . . Picard convincingly demonstrates that computers can also be designed to think about feelings and how to rationally act in light of them. . . . A groundbreaking preface to a plausible direction in computer design.& quot; — Norman Weinstein, Technology Review”Compelling. . . . Picard convincingly demonstrates that computers can also be designed to think about feelings and how to rationally act in light of them. . . . A groundbreaking preface to a plausible direction in computer design.”–Norman Weinstein, “Technology Review” Review Today’s computers are cold, logical machines. They needn’t be. In this important book, Rosalind Picard presents a compelling image, not only of how machines might come to have emotions, but why they must. Emotions: not just for animals and people.―Donald A. Norman, Hewlett-Packard; Professor Emeritus, Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego; Author of Things that make us smart About the Author Rosalind W. Picard is NEC Development Professor of Computers and Communications and Associate Professor of Media Technology at the MIT Media Laboratory. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Great book for knowing the history of affective computing and it’s evolution. Outdated for today’s classroom. I hope she writes another version on the cutting edge research being done in the present and how she sees the field in the next 10 years.

⭐A real breakthrough book

⭐Rosalind Picard’s book shouldn’t have broken new ground, but it did. The ignoring of the role of emotion in computing is both appalling and typical. Picard begins to rectify this “oversight” (“Whoops, I forgot humans have feelings!”) in a fascinating and useful book.

⭐Though published nearly 20 years ago, the author’s ideas and suggestions are very up to date and intriguing. She argues quite successfully that computing devices will need to move project and interpret emotions, just as humans do, in to relate better to human beings. At present computers respond to solely to text, not context such as the user’s state of mind, previous experience or future expectations. Games are one obvious application as they tell stories using characters which connect with and interact with the player. An emotionally aware game would be able, literally, to play with the user’s feelings.Today’s technology makes emotion based computing easier to achieve. Unlike 20 years ago, all computers today, even cell phones, have a high graphic resolution capable of displaying a human or even an animal like avatar capable of showing emotions. Though not all desktops (especially in offices) are equipped with cameras, all laptops and cellphones do so that at least facial expressions can be read and estimated. Here it’s not necessary for computers to have emotions, only that they be able to reason taking emotions into account and possibly provide an appropriate emotional response.Picard also points out several problems. Users might attribute greater intelligence and capability to a user interface that emotes and appears to understand us. Users might not only feel that they are being emotionally manipulated, this may be the explicit goal. Knowing this would lead the user to alter their reactions adding an additional layer of complexity. A software agent might become a hypereffective saleperson or adviser that could pathologically lie without any of the emotional or physical ticks that we look for in human beings. Even though humans can deceive, a deceitful AI would have a far greater potential reach. However unlike the situation with a human being it should also be possible to explicitly feed back to the user what emotions an AI is reading in you and what emotions it is trying to project. It doesn’t have to be cast as a game of deception. Still the ability to collect emotional information on clients raises additional privacy concerns.Where the book does well is in its coverage of a range of issues such as moods vs emotions, legal liability and in in its predictions of pervasive access and compute based wearables.

⭐Most of this book is a primer for non-clinicians on what is meant by ‘human emotions’, and how a computer in physical contact with someone could identify that person’s mood and respond appropriately to it. Picard makes her case that ’emotional intelligence’ would be a useful attribute for software. A human who loses the ability to feel emotions becomes, not admirably logical like Mr. Spock, but unable to make quick, simple, arbitrary decisions and prone to repeat mistakes. Just like most software today. Picard relates the use of affective computing primarily to the ‘wearable computers’ that researchers at MIT have been playing with for over 10 years to do mostly trivial functions like take photographs and generate muzak. There wasn’t much here for those of us who have to interact through keyboards/mice and monitors, and surprisingly no attempt to connect affective computing with related techniques such as fuzzy logic. There is an excellent source reference list at the back.

⭐In pop-culture there is the usual dichotomy between someone who “thinks with their head” and one who “thinks with their heart”. In fact, the more enlightened thinkers realize that this dichotomy is at least half false: people who are emotionally-impaired are not more rational than the rest of us, but are rather quite crippled and incapable of facing everyday life. (Though if you are not already convinced of this, this book will do little to persuade you.)At the time when I first read this book, nearly a year ago now upon the recommendation of a friend, I was already convinced of the usefulness of emotions in AI, and was hoping to find some real concrete and useful results here regarding AI-emotion, which I could then apply to the design and construction of an AI which would presumably be of use to someone in the real world. Much to my dismay, there are NO such applications listed; Picard suggests that AIs should be given emotions, but doesn’t bother to give any real applications in which these emotions would be useful, or what kind of emotions they should be given, or even what an “emotion” is for an AI!The book discusses almost exclusively the problem of AIs, not having emotions, but understanding the emotions of humans. Sounds great, how about some applications? Picard then proceeds to suggest the most absurd applications imaginable; here are a few of them:-Emotive Markup Language: Modify the hardware of a keyboard such that the computer can tell how much pressure was applied on each keystroke. Then have the machine interpret these pressure levels as “happy typing”, “angry typing”, etc., and then mark each portion of text appropriately, with say, big red bold letters for “angrily typed” word, and so on.-The understanding user interface: The user interface receives occasional feedback from the user, (blood pressure levels, questionnaire, whatever) from which it is to judge the user’s mood, such as anger or frustration, and then try to help the user out somehow if the user is becoming frustrated. Little does Picard realize that most users find a clairvoyant-wannabe computer more annoying than helpful.-Intelligent Answering Machines: Our answering machine receives a phone call, and presumably by talking to the individual on the other line, gathers some information as to the phone-call’s content. Meanwhile the answering machine is monitoring the emotional-state of its master, and if it infers that its master is in a mood that can be interrupted, and that the phone-call is of interest to its master, then the answering machine will tell its master that there is a call waiting, otherwise it will just take a message.If those are the most important problems facing an AI-researcher today, then the problem of AI must already be quite solved! In fact, in the past year I have been further enlightened, and have realized that AIs in fact don’t need emotions: just because humans need them is no argument at all that AIs need them! It is foolhardy to simply give AIs emotions without understanding WHY emotions evolved: we would just be copying superficial similarity; feathers aren’t the key to flight! It turns out that emotions are evolution’s own peculiar way of implementing probabilistic reasoning and goal-systems: every emotion can be translated into purely decision-theoretic terminology. For example, “curiosity” is a heuristic which can be replaced with a system which sets up experiments so as to maximize its expected information gain on each experiment.Of course, Picard could not simply say as much: she hints several times throughout her work that she believes in god, and that she intends her AIs to appreciate god as well. For example, we have the following quote:”A system that truly operates in a complex and unpredictable environment will need more than laws; it will essentially need values and principles, a moral compass for guidance, and perhaps even religion.” (page 134)Funny, I seem to be doing quite fine without religion!Overall and like most works of pure-philosophy, this book is intellectually quite sparse: Picard says more or less everything she has to say in the first 50 pages, but then somehow manages to drag her book out for another 200 pages by mentioning various things only tangentially related to the topic under discussion and rephrasing what she has already said. This short review alone contains a good deal more content than do a dozen pages from this book.

⭐Exactly like the description. I can’t wait to read it now!

⭐No he terminado de leer todavía, aun así, las bases puestas son muy claras para avanzar en este camino, ahora solo queda ampliar todo lo que en el se comenta.Lo tomo como base para mi proyecto.Ce livre concerne vraiment l’IA ( intelligence artificielle) et l’auteure met en avant l’apport de l’IA pour la gestion des émotions de l’humain ( motivation, harmonisation des émotions, panels de reconnaissance).

⭐

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