Rosalind Picard - On the Challenges of Affective Computing

[Music] Crystal [Music]

and it's hard to see now because now people like see how important emotion is as as a shaper of rational behavior and processes and we know now that it is

integral to rational decision making and interaction and um you know pretty much most of our daily social lives but at

the time it was seen as that which was Fluffy and made us irrational and it was the last thing you would want to put in a [Music]

computer I remember showing up at one of my hardcore computer vision patent recognition conferences shortly after this and you know I had you know given a number of presentations there and had

been very successful with my content based retrieval work and I remember some people whispering behind my back going have you heard what she's working on now you know like like like suddenly I had gone off the deepend and maybe they

didn't want to you know walk up and talk to me anymore uh but I believed what I was doing was going to really help give some new insights that would be

important and I um I'm pretty stubborn when I once I'm convinced by the facts which took me a while I did a ton of reading before I was convinced uh once

I'm convinced I'm I'm pretty stubborn so I forged ahead with it and I remember um being really happy about five years later going back to this conference and one of those people who had you know

been like really a Gass at my stuff came up and said he wanted to start working on it and he want know if he could have some of my data so it was like yes they're coming around it just takes

[Music] time [Music] well some of them are still warming up to the idea I've had some colleagues

come up to me and they look at my feet and they go Raz I can't understand why you're wasting your time working on emotion emotion doesn't matter it's just

noise you know we are interested in the signal not the noise you know and I'm like well at least they're looking at my feet not theirs right if they're looking at my feet they're extroverted right if they're looking at their feet they're

introverted um so so there are a lot of people in our community who really don't get emotion and they don't see that it does anything other than get in the way uh so it may still take a long time to

convince them some may never be convinced um meanwhile a lot of people have seen that you can now begin to measure part of this you can now test

for how it influences things it has powerful influences even in very rational decision-making economic judgments um of course in behavioral

choices uh of course in social interaction and I guess behavioral economics have helped make your case you know by by kind of like D strong the rational men model yeah exactly experiments yeah and not just that you

know a whole bunch of affective Neuroscience you know I'd say there's just been a huge surge in uh good research on emotion in the last several

decades so thank you very much for for coming you know to Cambridge days today it was it was a pleasure learning about your work learning about your life and know look forward you know to see you

again in the future thank you SAR this is a pleasure thanks Crystal com

aams Mees into millions of bues play hide and seek in the castles the sand for

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