Affective Computing
📜 Abstract
Computers are beginning to acquire the ability to express and recognize affect, and may soon be given the ability to “have emotions.” The essential role of emotion in both human cognition and perception, as demonstrated by recent neurological studies, indicates that affective computers should not only provide better performance in assisting humans, but also might enhance computers’ abilities to make decisions. This paper presents and discusses key issues in “affective computing,” computing that relates to, arises from, or influences emotions. Models are suggested for computer recognition of human emotion, and new applications are presented for computer-assisted learning, perceptual information retrieval, arts and entertainment, and human health and interaction. Affective computing, coupled with new wearable computers, will also provide the ability to gather new data necessary for advances in emotion and cognition theory.
✨ Summary
Impact and influence. Picard’s 1995 technical report introduced and defined “affective computing” as computing related to, arising from, or deliberately influencing emotion, while proposing affect recognition, expression, dynamic state models, wearable sensing, and applications in education, human-computer interaction, multimedia, health, and machine intelligence. MIT’s archival description identifies the report as establishing challenges and future directions for the emerging field. (hd.media.mit.edu)
Subsequent research treated the report as a foundational reference: a 2021 bibliometric study of affective-computing research from 1995–2020 reports 3,448 screened publications, identifies Rosalind Picard as among the field’s most influential researchers from 1995 to 2015, and describes the field’s expansion into multimodal sensing, sentiment analysis, physiological-signal processing, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. (nature.com)
The proposed research directions also correspond to later industry activity. The same bibliometric study reports that Picard-associated companies Affectiva and Empatica commercialized emotional-AI tools involving wearable sensors and analytics for applications including advertising, driver monitoring, and health. This documents practical industrial development in areas anticipated by the report, but does not by itself establish that every product directly derives from the technical report. (nature.com)