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Rosalind Picard

Professor, MIT Media Lab

Founding Director, Affective Computing Research Group, Media Lab

Co-founder, Affectiva Inc.

Co-founder, Empatica Inc.

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About Rosalind

PhD Advisor: Alex(Sandy) Pentland

Alma Mater (Grad): MIT(1984-1986, 1987-1991)

Alma Mater (UGrad): Georgia Institute of Technology(1980-1984)

Awards: IEEE fellow, National Academy of Engineering

Frequented Venues: IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing,

ACII, AAAC,

Research Areas: Affective Computing, Emotional Intelligence,

Health & Wellbeing, Physiological Signal Processing, HCI

Alex Pentland

Rosalind Picard

Thad

Starner

Tanzeem Choudhury

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Career Path

1991

Student

1995

Assistant Professor

2005

1980

Associate Professor

Professor

2010

2013

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Startups

  • Affectiva
    • Track human perception in Automotive and conversational interfaces
    • ~62.6M total funding
    • 50 - 200 employees
    • Left in 2013
  • Empatica
    • Medical Wearables and AI
    • ~7.8M total funding
    • <50 employees

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Research Timeline

1991

Texture modeling

1997

Affective Computing

2001

Physiological

Sensing

Mobile Emotional Health

Add emotion to HCI/HRI

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PhD Era

--not really related to her research as a faculty

  • Signal Processing(part of a book)
  • Speech processing Research Program
  • Markov/Gibbs texture modeling: Aura matrices and temperature effects
  • Texture Modeling--temperature Effects on Markov/Gibbs Random Fields(Thesis)
  • Miscibility matrices explain the behavior of gray-scale textures generated by Gibbs random fields

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  • Sensing emotions
    • Face
    • Voice
    • Body
    • heart rate, diastolic and systolic blood pressure, pulse, pupillary dilation, respiration, skin conductance and temperature...
  • Wearable computers
  • Give computer emotions

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TED Talk: Technology and Emotions

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Sensing Emotion

  • Emotional speech
  • Facial affect
    • Expression
    • Facial color
  • Body gesture
  • Physiological signals
    • PPG
    • EMG
    • Skin response(conductance etc.)
    • temperature

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Wearables for emotion and health

2002

2010

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  • Help people express their emotions
    • Autism
    • Kids

  • Help others understand people’s emotions

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Machine emotional intelligence

  • Problematic day-to-day variation

  • 81% recognition accuracy on eight classes of emotion, including neutral

  • affective feedback is important for HCI

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Add emotion to computing device?

Eyecam:

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Health and Wellbeing: Visual PPG

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Visual PPG

  • Physiological measurements
    • Heart rate
    • Respiratory rate
    • Heart rate variability

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Impact -- other rPPG research

  • Heart rate, heart rate variability, Afib…

  • Indicator of stress

  • Deep learning based rPPG

  • rPPG for blood pressure

Daniel McDuff, MSR

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Current Research

  • emotional feedback for robots and computers

  • health and wellbeing

  • Forecast and prevent stress, depression

  • help people with face communication, motivation, and emotion regulation challenges

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Discussion

  • What can we do with emotion
    • Though ground truth is hard
  • Pioneer in a research field
    • Hard to publish?
  • Research during PhD vs research after that
    • What makes the change?
    • Get a faculty position without dozens of publications?

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Thanks!