Communications of the ACM
Can Your Computer Make You Happy?
Researchers are seeking ways of using emotions to adjust and modify human-computer interactions.
Credit: The Independent
Computers that can recognize users' emotional states are under development in the hope that the machines can be made capable of improving the human-computer interface. "Technologists have largely ignored emotion and created an often frustrating experience for people, in part because affect has been misunderstood and is hard to measure," according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Affective Computing lab.
Birmingham University lecturer Russell Beale points out that people become more engaged with systems that seem to exhibit emotional responses. "In the same way that it's easier talking to someone who has empathy with what you're saying, who gives you extra responses apart from just a straightforward verbal reply, it makes our everyday interactions much easier," he says. "In the right cases, putting empathy into computer systems is really going to help."
From The Independent
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