Can we build AI with Emotional Intelligence? The 2018 Annual Charles Simonyi Lecture

Today’s AI can play games, drive cars, even do our jobs for us. But surely our human emotional world is beyond the limits of what AI can achieve? In this year’s Annual Charles Simonyi Lecture, Professor Rosalind Picard challenges that belief. Robots, wearables, and other AI technologies are gaining the ability to sense, recognize, and respond intelligently to human emotion. This talk will highlight several important findings made at MIT, including surprises about the 'true smile of happiness,' and finding electrical signals on the wrist that reveal insight into deep brain activity, with implications for autism, anxiety, epilepsy, mood disorders, and more.

Rosalind Picard is founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the MIT Media Laboratory, faculty chair of MindHandHeart, and cofounder of Affectiva and cofounder and chief scientist of Empatica. Picard is the author of 300 peer-reviewed scientific articles, and known internationally for her book Affective Computing, which is credited for launching the field by that name. Picard is an active inventor with over a dozen patents and her lab's achievements have been profiled worldwide including in Wired, New Scientist and on the BBC.