Fall 2014 Schedule

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November 11, 2014
Roz Picard , Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Media Lab
TSRB 132 12:00-1:00pm

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Title: Surprising Findings from Affective Computing

Abstract: More than fifteen years ago I set out to build the first computational systems to recognize emotion. My team and I built wearable sensors and created new algorithms for signal processing of speech and physiology, computer vision, pattern analysis and machine learning, while developing new methods to get real-world affective data including crowd-sourcing. Our work has spanned affect recognition from faces, voices, posture, physiology, and multimodal combinations. In this talk I will highlight recent surprising findings. These findings include discerning truly happy smiles, cameras that can read heart rate and respiration non-contact, use of motion sensors in Google Glass to read heart-rate and respiration, the value of colors beyond RGB, electrical signals on the wrist that reflect deep brain activity, and surprising implications for autism, sleep, epilepsy, and learning.

Biography: Professor Rosalind W. Picard, Sc.D. is founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the (MIT) Media Lab and co-director of the Things That Think Consortium. She has co-founded two businesses, Empatica, Inc. creating wearable sensors and analytics to improve health, and Affectiva, Inc. delivering technology to help measure and communicate emotion. Picard holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering with highest honors from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and master's and doctorate degrees, both in electrical engineering and computer science, from MIT. In 1991 she joined the MIT Media Lab faculty. She became internationally known for constructing mathematical texture models for content-based retrieval of images and for pioneering methods of automated search and annotation in digital video including the Photobook system. The year before she was up for tenure she took a risk and published the book Affective Computing, which became instrumental in starting a new field by that name. Today that field has its own journal, international conference, and professional society. Picard was also a founding member of the IEEE Technical Committee on Wearable Information Systems in 1998, helping launch the field of wearable computing.

November 25, 2014
Fred Shic , Yale University, Child Study Center
TSRB 175 (Auditorium) 3:00-4:00pm

December 2, 2014
Patricio Vela , Georgia Institute of Technology, Electrical & Computer Engineering
Pettit Microelectronics Building (MiRC) 102 3:00-4:00pm

All talks are open to the public and lunch will be served, so come early