Syllabus

Course Meeting Times

Lectures: 1 session / week, 2 hours / session

Textbook

Buy at Amazon Picard, R. W. Affective Computing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. ISBN: 9780262661157.

Class Structure

As a participant in this course, you will be asked to form a group with 2-3 other people. Each week, you will meet with members of your group to discuss the readings and respond to questions from the assignments page as well as any other questions espoused during your conversations. Additionally, the first three class sessions will be facilitated by the instructor. From the third session onward, study groups will take over. By the end of the term, all individuals and each study group will have had an opportunity to facilitate the learning process. Each week, the instructor will forward copies of each study group responses so that the facilitating group can take them into account when planning an agenda for the class. This agenda should include discussion of questions posed by each group as well as brief updates of project progress.

Topics Covered

  • Neuroscience findings related to emotion
  • Emotion and perception, decision-making, and creativity
  • Emotion and learning
  • Physiology of emotion
  • Affect recognition by machines (including wearable systems)
  • Communicating frustration/stress in autism and in customer experience
  • Responding to user emotion to reduce user frustration
  • Inducing emotion
  • Robots/agents that "have" emotion
  • Emotion and behavior
  • Expression of emotion by machines/agents/synthetic characters
  • Philosophical, social, ethical implications of affective computing
  • Empathy

Project

You will be required to complete a project for the course. As a part of this project you are asked to submit a proposal draft by Ses #5 and a final proposal due Ses #6. Project presentations will occur Ses #11 and Ses #12.

Attendance

All students are expected to attend all classes and all project presentations. Please contact Prof. Rosalind Picard in advance if you will have to miss class. Unexcused absence will affect your grade. The final project presentations are especially important for everyone to attend; please do not plan to leave for summer until after the last day of class.

Writing and Presentations Assistance

The MIT Writing and Communication Center offers you free professional advice from published writers about oral presentations and about all types of academic, creative, and professional writing.

Grading

ACTIVITIES PERCENTAGES
Classroom participation 20%
Nine assignments (reading/response) 40%
Project and presentation 40%

 

Calendar

LEC # TOPICS INSTRUCTORS KEY DATES
1 Course introduction, visitors welcome Prof. Rosalind Picard Response 1 due 4 days later
2 Technologies for recognizing affect-related information Prof. Rosalind Picard Response 2 due 4 days later
3 Empathy and its measurement

Shani Daily, TA

Guest speaker: Carl Marci, MD, MGH

 Response 3 due 4 days later
4 How do you build empathetic technology? What happens when technology appears to show empathy? Picard leading Prof. Rosalind Picard Response 4 due 4 days later
5 Multi-modal affect recognition and recognition from facial expression M. Todd Farrell, Media Lab Biomechatronics Research Group  
6 Reading emotions from facial expressions and emotion as a constructed process Guest speaker: Prof. James Russell, Boston College Project proposal due
7 Emotion regulation Rob Morris, Media Lab Affective Computing Group

Response 5 due 3 days before

Response 6 due 4 days later
8 Cognitive-affective influences; creativity; detection of subtle affect Prof. Rosalind Picard

Paragraph on project accomplishments due

Response 7 due 4 days later
9 Affect in patient-physician interactions John Moore, MD, Media Lab New Media Medicine Group  
10 Potential concerns of affective computing research Jackie Lee, Media Lab Affective Computing Group Response 8 due
11 New affective technology research directions Prof. Rosalind Picard  
12 Project presentations