Will we see emotionally intelligent machines in 2016? Andrew Moore, the dean of Carnegie Mellon and former vice president of Google, told ZDNet something exciting. Moore predicts that 2016 will see a rapid growth in research into emotional understanding by machines.
Robots, smart phones, computers will very quickly begin to understand how we feel and will be able to respond accordingly.
“There will be no immediate uses,” he explains.
“But monitoring a patient with an emotionally intelligent computer will allow doctors to understand the distress when the patient is unable to communicate. Measuring student engagement by looking at their emotional response will help educators be more effective. These are clear wins.”
But, Moore warns, the transition to gadgets with emotional understanding can be uneven.
Imagine this valuable information falling into the hands of advertisers…. Technology should move forward with scrutiny and criticism.
People emit several distinct signals about how they are feeling, both consciously and unconsciously, and research in this area has taken several parallel paths.
Vocal patterns can reveal anxiety and excitement, and facial muscle movement provides a revealing map of a person's internal state.
“Cameras are now higher resolution. High-resolution cameras can track small movements on the face or even individual hairs.”
Robotics and computer scientists have applied advances in artificial vision to existing research data from the field of psychology on emotional intelligence.
Currently, most emotionally intelligent machines pick up patterns of emotion from body language and facial expressions. But there is also the tantalizing possibility that machine learning could be used to allow machines to better understand the strategies for interpreting emotions. Ultimately, this could lead to devices that are more emotionally insightful than humans themselves.
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