ISTD 2003, Thoughts and Emotions

Interactive Systems Technical Design

Seminar work: Thoughts & Emotions

Saija GronroosMika RautanenJuha Sunnari

ISTD 2003, Thoughts and Emotions

Introduction

• Thought• The act of thinking

• Emotion• A moving of the mind or soul

• Emotional skills• Ability to recognize and express emotions

• E.g. Happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear and disgust

• Emotions makes us individuals and forms our personalities

ISTD 2003, Thoughts and Emotions

Introduction (cont.)

• Humans express their emotions through actions• Visual, auditory and tactile modality

• E.g. Facial expressions, voice intonation, gestures...

• The machines communicates to humans through• Voice, displayed information, movement...

ISTD 2003, Thoughts and Emotions

Motivation

• To make more effective, adaptive and natural HCI systems

• Emotions play an important role in rational decision making, perception, learning, memory and a variety of other cognitive functions.

• People tend to interact with machines as if they were social actors

• Multiple applications• E.g. Entertaiment, adaptive user interfaces, ergonomic

furniture...

ISTD 2003, Thoughts and Emotions

Implementation

• Emotional HCI systems input components• Cameras, microphones, IR-sensors, special body

sensors, pressure and ultrasonic sensors...

• Software agents embed artificial emotions• ”A software agent is a computational system

which has goals, sensors, and effectors, and decides autonomously which actions to take, and when”

ISTD 2003, Thoughts and Emotions

Implementation (cont.)

ISTD 2003, Thoughts and Emotions

Implementation (cont..)

• Emotional HCI systems output components• Speakers, displays, lights...

• Emotional expression should be used by all media available to a machine

ISTD 2003, Thoughts and Emotions

Kismet

• A part of the Sociable Machines project at MIT AI lab.

• A humanoid robot• models infant social behaviour• capable of natural and

expressive interaction• facial expressions, gaze direction,

speech, gestures

ISTD 2003, Thoughts and Emotions

Kismet/HW Design

• Vision system• consists of 4 cameras

• Auditory system• user wears a wireless mic• synthesizer for speech

generation

Kismet says: ”You´re leaving tomorrow”

Angry Calm Sad

ISTD 2003, Thoughts and Emotions

Kismet/System architecture

• Low-level feature extraction system• processes raw sensory

information

• High-level perceptual system• categorizes perceptual

features

• Attention system• processes visual

information and controls robots attention and gaze

ISTD 2003, Thoughts and Emotions

Kismet/System architecture (cont.)

• Motivation system• control and maintain robots well-being

• consists of basic drives and emotions

• Behaviour system• determines which behaviour to activate and for

how long

• Motor system• controls expressive interaction

ISTD 2003, Thoughts and Emotions

Kismet/Emotional system

• Based on various theories of basic human emotions

• Affected by both internal and enviromental stimulants

ISTD 2003, Thoughts and Emotions

Kismet

• Kismet project lead Cynthia Breazeal gives an overview of Kismets emotional system.

ISTD 2003, Thoughts and Emotions

Other applications

• Cyberlink

• Emotion aware office chair

• Aibo

• Active space

ISTD 2003, Thoughts and Emotions

Strengths / Advantages

• More natural interaction (Kismet)

• Makes adaptivity possible

• Creates a more richer user experience• e.g. entertaiment applications

ISTD 2003, Thoughts and Emotions

Weaknesses

• Possibility for misinterpretation

• HW resource demanding

• Expensive

ISTD 2003, Thoughts and Emotions

Selected Industrial Players

• Sony• Aibo, entertainment application

• Bandai• Tamagotchi

• Electronic arts• The Sims, computer game

• Lego• Lego Mindstorms, robotics invention system (RCX Microcontroller actually

used in many prototype emotional robots.)

• iRobot• My Real Baby

• NEC• Personal robot Papero, similar idea with Aibo and Tamagotchi

• Brain Actuated Technologies• Cyberlink, hands free HCI device

ISTD 2003, Thoughts and Emotions

Selected International Research Groups and Projects

• MIT AI lab Humanoid robotics group• The Sociable Machines Project, Kismet

• http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/humanoid-robotics-group/kismet/kismet.html

• Microsoft research• the Persona Project: ”Lifelike computer characters”

• http://research.microsoft.com

• The Intelligent Software Agents Lab• Carnegie Mellon university, several projects

• http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~softagents/

• University of Tampere, the research group for emotions, sociality and computing• Emotions and sociality in human-computer interaction

• http://www.cs.uta.fi/hci/ESC/index.html

• University of Oulu, MediaTeam • Multiparametric prosodic analysis of phonetic and

phonological correlates of emotions• http://www.mediateam.oulu.fi

ISTD 2003, Thoughts and Emotions

Future Developments

• Raymond Kurzweil speaks of robot emotions and intelligence