Affective Computing

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.

This volume maps the watershed areas between two 'holy grails' of computer science: the identification and interpretation of affect – including sentiment and mood. The expression of sentiment and mood involves the use of metaphors, especially in emotive situations. Affect computing is rooted in hermeneutics, philosophy, political science and sociology, and is now a key area of research in computer science. The 24/7 news sites and blogs facilitate the expression and shaping of opinion locally and globally. Sentiment analysis, based on text and data mining, is being used in the looking at news and blogs for purposes as diverse as: brand management, film reviews, financial market analysis and prediction, homeland security. There are systems that learn how sentiments are articulated. This work draws on, and informs, research in fields as varied as artificial intelligence, especially reasoning and machine learning, corpus-based information extraction, linguistics, and psychology.

Since interactions may occur between animals, humans, or computational agents, an interdisciplinary approach which investigates foundations of affective communication in a variety of platforms is indispensable. In the field of affective computing, a collection of research, merging decades of research on emotions in psychology, cognition and neuroscience will inspire creative future research projects and contribute to the prosperity of this emerging field. Affective Computing and Interaction: Psychological, Cognitive and Neuroscientific Perspectives examines the current state and the future prospects of affect in computing within the context of interactions. Uniting several aspects of affective interactions and topics in affective computing, this reference reviews basic foundations of emotions, furthers an understanding of the contribution of affect to our lives and concludes by revealing current trends and promising technologies for reducing the emotional gap between humans and machines, all within the context of interactions.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction, ACII 2007. It covers affective facial expression and recognition, affective body expression and recognition, affective speech processing, affective text and dialogue processing, recognizing affect using physiological measures, computational models of emotion and theoretical foundations, and affective sound and music processing.

"The Oxford Handbook of Affective Computing is a definitive reference in the burgeoning field of affective computing (AC), a multidisciplinary field encompassing computer science, engineering, psychology, education, neuroscience, and other disciplines. AC research explores how affective factors influence interactions between humans and technology, how affect sensing and affect generation techniques can inform our understanding of human affect, and on the design, implementation, and evaluation of systems involving affect at their core. The volume features 41 chapters and is divided into five sections: history and theory, detection, generation, methodologies, and applications. Section 1 begins with the making of AC and a historical review of the science of emotion. The following chapters discuss the theoretical underpinnings of AC from an interdisciplinary viewpoint. Section 2 examines affect detection or recognition, a commonly investigated area. Section 3 focuses on aspects of affect generation, including the synthesis of emotion and its expression via facial features, speech, postures, and gestures. Cultural issues are also discussed. Section 4 focuses on methodological issues in AC research, including data collection techniques, multimodal affect databases, formats for the representation of emotion, crowdsourcing techniques, machine learning approaches, affect elicitation techniques, useful AC tools, and ethical issues. Finally, Section 5 highlights applications of AC in such domains as formal and informal learning, games, robotics, virtual reality, autism research, health care, cyberpsychology, music, deception, reflective writing, and cyberpsychology. This compendium will prove suitable for use as a textbook and serve as a valuable resource for everyone with an interest in AC."--

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction, ACII 2005, held in Beijing, China in October 2005 as an associated event of ICCV 2005, the International Conference on Computer Vision. The 45 revised full papers and 81 revised poster papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 198 submissions. They cover a wide range of topics, such as facial expression recognition, face animation, emotional speech synthesis, intelligent agent, and virtual reality. The papers are organized in topical sections on affective face and gesture processing, affective speech processing, evaluation of affective expressivity, affective database, annotation and tools, psychology and cognition of affect, and affective interaction and systems and applications.

'Affective computing' is a branch of computing concerned with the theory and construction of machines which can detect, respond to, and simulate human emotional states. This book presents an interdisciplinary exploration of this rapidly expanding field, aimed at those in psychology, computational neuroscience, computer science, and AI.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction, ACII 2007, held in Lisbon, Portugal, in September 2007. The 57 revised full papers and 4 revised short papers presented together with the extended abstracts of 33 poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 151 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on affective facial expression and recognition, affective body expression and recognition, affective speech processing, affective text and dialogue processing, recognising affect using physiological measures, computational models of emotion and theoretical foundations, affective databases, annotations, tools and languages, affective sound and music processing, affective interactions: systems and applications, as well as evaluating affective systems.