SEMINAR REPORT ON

AFFECTIVE COMPUTING

SUBMITTED BY:

NAVEED S
ROLL NO.-15
S7 CSE
COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING
PERUMON
 ABSTRACT
Affective computing is computing that relates to, arises from or deliberately
influences emotions. Neurological studies indicate that the role of emotions in human
cognition is essential and that emotions play a critical role in rational decision-
making, perception, human interaction and human intelligence. In the view of
increased human computer interaction or HCI it has become important that for proper
and full interaction between Humans and Computers, computers should be able to at
least recognize and react to different user emotion states.
Emotion is a difficult thing to classify and study fully. Therefore to replicate or to
detect emotions in agents is a challenging task. In Human-Human interaction it is
often easy to see if a person is angry, happy, or frustrated etc. It is not easy to
replicate such an ability in an agent. In this seminar I will be dealing with different
aspects of affective computing including a brief study of human emotions, theory and
practice related to affective systems, challenges to affective computing and systems
which have been developed which and support this type of interaction. I will also be
doing a tryst into the area of ethics related to this field as well as implication of
computers which will have emotions of their own. Affective computing is an
emerging, interdisciplinary area, addressing a variety of research, methodological, and
technical issues pertaining to the integration of affect into human-computer
interaction.
The specific research areas include recognition of distinct affective states, user
interface adaptation and function integration due to changes in user’s affective state,
supporting technologies such as wearable computing for improved affective state
detection and adaptation.
 INTRODUCTION
Affective computing aims at developing computers with understanding capabilities
vastly beyond today’s computer systems. Affective computing is computing that
relates to, or arises from, or deliberately influences emotion. Affective computing also
involves giving machines skills of emotional intelligence: the ability to recognize and
respond intelligently to emotion, the ability to appropriately express (or not express)
emotion, and the ability to manage emotions. The latter ability involves handling both
the emotions of others and the emotions within one self.
Today, more than ever, the role of computers in interacting with people is of
importance. Most computer users are not engineers and do not have the time or desire
to learn and stay up to date on special skills for making use of a computer’s
assistance. The emotional abilities given to computers are intended for helping
address the problem of interacting with complex systems leading to smoother
interaction between the two. Emotional intelligence that is the ability to respond to
one’s own and others emotions is often viewed as more important than mathematical
or other forms of intelligence. Equipping computer agents with such intelligence will
be the keystone in the future of computer agents.
Emotions in people consist of a constellation of regulatory and biasing mechanisms,
operating throughout the body and brain, modulating just about everything a person
does. Emotion can affect the way you walk, talk, type, gesture, compose a sentence,
or otherwise communicate. Thus to infer a person’s emotion, there are multiple
signals you can sense and try to associate with an underlying affective state.
Depending on which sensors is available (auditory, visual, textual, physiological,
biochemical, etc.) one can look for different patterns of emotion’s influence. The most
active areas for machine motion recognition have been in automating facial
expression recognition, vocal inflection recognition, and reasoning about emotion
given text input about goals and actions. The signals are then processed using pattern
recognition techniques like hidden Markov models (HMM’s), hidden decision trees,
auto-regressive HMM’s, Support Vector Machines and neural networks.
The response of such an affective system is also very important consideration. It could
have a preset response to each user emotional state or it could learn from trying out
different strategies on the subject with the passing of time and deciding the best
option as time passes on. user, to see which are most pleasing. Indeed, a core property
of such learning systems is the ability to sense positive or negative feedback –
affective feedback – and incorporates this into the learning routine. A wide range of
uses have been determined and implemented for such systems. These include systems,
which detect the stress level in car drivers to toys, which sense the mood of the child
and reacts accordingly.

A GENERAL OVERVIEW
A general system with users who have affect or emotion and the surrounding world
can be represented by the following sketch.

The most important component of the system will be the emotive user. This is any
user or being who has emotions and whose actions and decisions are influenced by his
emotions. The user forms the core of any affective system. This affect makes him able
to communicate to other humans and computers and to his self. Human to human
affective communication is a widely studied branch of psychology and is one of the
base subjects which where explored when Affective computing was considered.

Now in a general way it can be said that a human user will display an emotion. This
emotion will be sensed by any one of the interfaces to the affective application. This
might be a wearable computer or any other device, which has been designed for
inputting affective signals. In this way the sensing of the affective signal takes place.
A pattern recognition algorithm is further applied to recognize the affective state of
the user. The affective state is now understood and modeled. This information is now
passed to an affective application or an affective computer, which uses it to
communicate back with the emotive user. Research is also going on as to synthesizing
affect in computers, which will provide further dimension of originality to the Human
Computer Interaction. Each of the dimensions of affective interaction is discussed
below.

EMOTIONAL OR AFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION

Affective communication is communicating with someone (or something) either with
or about affect. A crying child, and a parent comforting that child, are both engaged in
affective communication. An angry customer complaining to a customer service
representative, and that representative trying to clear up the problem are both also
engaged in affective communication. We communicate through affective channels
naturally every day. Indeed, most of us are experts in expressing, recognizing and
dealing with emotions. However, affective communication that involves computers
represents a vast but largely untapped research area. What role can computers play in
affective communication? How can they assist us in putting emotional channels back
into communication technologies such as email and online chat where the emotional
content is lost? How can computer technology support us in getting to know our own
bodies, and our own emotions? What role can computers play in helping manage
frustration, especially frustration that arises from using technology? Researchers are
beginning to investigate several key aspects of Affective Communication as it relates
to computers. Affective communication may involve giving computers the ability to
recognize emotional expressions as a step toward interpreting what the user might be
feeling. However, the focus in this area is on communication that involves emotional
expression. Expressions of emotion can be communicated to others without an
intermediate step of recognition; they can simply be "transduced" into a form that can
be digitally transmitted and re-presented at another location. Several devices are being
investigated for facilitating this, under the name of Affective Mediation - using
computers to help communicate emotions to other people through various media.

Affective Mediation
Technology supporting machine-mediated communication continues to grow and
improve, but much of it still remains impoverished with respect to emotional
expression. While much of the current research in the group focuses on sensing and
understanding the emotional state of the user or the development of affective
interfaces, research in Affective Mediation explores ways to increase the "affective
bandwidth" of computer-mediated communication through the use of graphical
visualization. By graphical visualization, it means the representation of emotional
information in an easy-to-understand, computer graphics format. Currently the focus
is on physiological information, but it may also include behavioral information (such
as if someone is typing louder or faster than usual.) Building on traditional
representations of physiological signals – continuously updating line graphs -- one
approach is to represent the user's physiology in three-dimensional, real-time
computer graphics, and to provide unique, innovative, and unobtrusive ways to collect
the data. This research focuses on using displays and devices in ways which will help
humans to communicate both with themselves and with one another in affect-
enhanced ways.
Human-to-Human Communication
From email to full-body videoconferencing, virtual communication is growing rapidly
in availability and complexity. Although this richness of communication options
improves our ability to converse with others who are far away or not available at the
precise moment that we are, the sense that something is missing continues to plague
users of current methodologies. Affective Communication seeks to provide new
devices and tools for supplementing person-to-person communications media.
Specifically, through the use of graphical displays viewable by any or all members of
a mediated conversation, researchers hope to provide an augmented experience of
affective expression, which supplements but also challenges traditional computer
mediated communication.
Human-to-Self (Reflexive) Communication
Digitized representation of affective responses creates possibilities for our
relationship to our own bodies and affective response patterns. Affective
communication with oneself – reflexive communication - explores the exciting
possibilities of giving people access to their own physiological patterns in ways
previously unavailable, or available only to medical and research personnel with
special, complex, or expensive equipment. The graphical approach creates new
technologies with the express goal of allowing the user to gain information and
insight about his or her own responses.
Computer expression of emotion
This work represents a controversial area of human-computer interaction, in part since
attributing emotions and emotional understanding to machines has been identified as a
philosophical problem: what does it mean for a machine to express emotions that it
doesn't feel? What does it mean for humans to feel "empathized with" by machines
that are simply unable to really "feel" what a person is going through? Currently, few
computer systems have been designed specifically to interact on an emotional level.
An example is the smile that Macintosh users are greeted with, indicating that "all is
well" with the boot disk. If there is a problem with the boot disk, the machine displays
the "sad Mac".
Humans are experts at interpreting facial expressions and tones of voice, and making
accurate inferences about others' internal states from these clues. Controversy rages
over anthropomorphism: Should researchers leverage this expertise in the service of
computer interface design, since attributing human characteristics to machines often
means setting unrealistic as well as unfulfillable expectations about the machine's
capabilities? Show a human face, expect human capabilities that far outstrip the
machine? Yet the fact remains that faces have been used effectively to represent a
wide variety of internal states. And with careful design, researchers regard emotional
expression via face and sound as a potentially effective means of communicating a
wide array of information to computer users. As systems become more capable of
emotional communication with users, researchers see systems needing more and more
sophisticated emotionally-expressive capability.
 SENSING HUMAN EMOTIONS
Sensors are an important part of an Affective Computing System because they
provide information about the wearer's physical state or behavior. They can gather
data in a continuous way without having to interrupt the user. There are many types of
sensors being developed to accommodate and to detect different types of emotions.
Some are listed below.
The Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) Sensor
Galvanic Skin Response is a measure of the skin's conductance between two
electrodes. Electrodes are small metal plates that apply a safe, imperceptibly tiny
voltage across the skin. The electrodes are typically attached to the subject's fingers or
toes using electrode cuffs or to any part of the body using a Silver-Chloride electrode
patch. To measure the resistance, a small voltage is applied to the skin and the skin's
current conduction is measured. Skin conductance is considered to be a function of
the sweat gland activity and the skin's pore size. An individual's baseline skin
conductance will vary for many reasons, including gender, diet, skin type and
situation. Sweat gland activity is controlled in part by the sympathetic nervous
system. When a subject is startled or experiences anxiety, there will be a fast increase
in the skin's conductance (a period of seconds) due to increased activity in the sweat
glands (unless the glands are saturated with sweat.)
After a startle, the skin's conductance will decrease naturally due to reabsorption.
There is a saturation to the effect: when the duct of the sweat gland fills there is no
longer a possibility of further increasing skin conductance. Excess sweat pours out of
the duct. Sweat gland activity increases the skin's capacity to conduct the current
passing through it and changes in the skin conductance reflect changes in the level of
arousal in the sympathetic nervous system.
The Blood Volume Pulse Sensor
The Blood Volume pulse sensor uses photoplethysmography to detect the blood
pressure in the extremities. It is a process of applying a light source and measuring the
light reflected by the skin. At each contraction of the heart, blood is forced through
the peripheral vessels, producing engorgement of the vessels under the light source--
thereby modifying the amount of light to the photosensor. The resulting pressure
waveform is recorded. Since vasomotor activity (activity which controls the size of
the blood vessels) is controlled by the sympathetic nervous system, the BVP
measurements can display changes in sympathetic arousal. An increase in the BVP
amplitude indicates decreased sympathetic arousal and greater blood flow to the
fingertips.
The Respiration Sensor
The respiration sensor can be placed either over the sternum for thoracic monitoring
or over the diaphram for diaphragmatic monitoring. In all experiments so far we have
used diaphragmatic monitoring. The sensor consists mainly of a large Velcro belt,
which extends around the chest cavity and a small elastic which stretches as the
subject's chest cavity expands. The amount of stretch in the elastic is measured as a
voltage change and recorded. From the waveform, the depth the subject's breath and
the subject's rate of respiration can be learned.
The Electromyogram (EMG) Sensor
The electromyographic sensors measure the electrical activity produced by a muscle
when it is being contracted, amplify the signal and send it to the encoder. There, a
band pass filter is applied to the signal. For all our experiments, the sensor has used
the 0-400 microvolt range and the 20-500 Hz filters, which is the most commonly
used position.
RECOGNIZING AFFECTIVE INPUT
The research work mainly involves efforts to understand the correlation of emotion
that can potentially be identified by a computer and primarily behavioral and
physiological expressions of emotion. Because we can measure physical events, and
cannot recognize a person's thoughts, research in recognizing emotion is limited to
correlates of emotional expression that can be sensed by a computer, including such
things as physiology, behavior, and even word selection when talking. Emotion
modulates not just memory retrieval and decision-making (things that are hard for a
computer to know), but also many sense-able actions such as the way you pick up a
pencil or bang on a mouse (things a computer can begin to observe). In assessing a
user's emotion, one can also measure an individual's self-report of how they are
feeling. Many people have difficulty recognizing and/or verbally expressing their
emotions, especially when there is a mix of emotions or when the emotions are
nondescript. In many situations it is also inappropriate to interrupt the user for a self-
report. Nonetheless, researchers think it is important that if a user wants to tell a
system verbally about their feelings, the system should facilitate this. Researchers are
interested in emotional expression through verbal as well as non-verbal means, not
just how something is said, but how word choice might reveal an underlying affective
state.
Our focus begins by looking at physiological correlates, measured both during lab
situations designed to arouse and elicit emotional response, and during ordinary (non-
lab) situations, the latter via affective wearable computing.
Our first efforts toward affect recognition have focused on detecting patterns in
physiology that we receive from sensing devices. To this effect, we are designing and
conducting experiments to induce particular affective responses. One of our primary
goals is to be able to determine which signals are related to which emotional states --
in other words, how to find the link between user's emotional state and its
corresponding physiological state. We are hoping to use, and build upon, some of the
work done by others on coupling physiological information with affective states.
Current efforts that use physiological sensing are focusing on:
• GSR (Galvanic Skin Response),
• ECG (Electrocardiogram),
• EMG (Electromyogram),
• BVP (Blood Volume Pressure),
• Respiration, and
• Temperature.

UNDERSTANDING THE AFFECTIVE INPUT

Once the Sensing and Recognition modules have made their best attempt to translate
user signals into patterns that signify the user's emotional responses, the system may
now be said to be primitively aware of the user's immediate emotional state. But what
can be done with this information? How will applications be able to make sense of
this moment-to-moment update on the user's emotional state, and make use of it? The
Affective Understanding module will use, process, and store this information, to build
and maintain a model of the user's emotional life in different levels of granularity-
from quick, specific combinations of affective responses--to meta-patterns of moods
and other emotional responses. This module will communicate knowledge from this
model with the other modules in the system.
The Affective Understanding module will eventually be able to incorporate contextual
information about the user and his/her environment, to generate appropriate responses
to the user that incorporate the user's emotional state, the user's cognitive abilities, and
his/her environmental situation.
The Affective Understanding module may:
• Absorb information, by receiving a constant data stream on the user's current
emotional state from the Recognition module.
• Remember the information, by keeping track of the user's emotional responses via
storage in short, medium, and long-term memory buffers.
• Model the user's current mood, by detecting meta-patterns in the user's emotional
responses over time, comparing these patterns to the user's previously defined moods,
and possibly canonical, universal or archetypal definitions of human moods
previously modeled.
• Model the user's emotional life. Recognize patterns in the way the user's emotional
states may change over time, to generate a model of the user's emotional states--
patterns in the typical types of emotional state that the user experiences, mood
variation, degrees of valence (i.e. mildly put off vs. enraged), pattern combinations
(i.e. tendencies toward a pattern of anger followed by depression).
• Apply the user affect model. This model may help the Affective Understanding
module by informing the actions that this module decides to take--actions that use the
Applications and Interface modules to customize the interaction between user and
system, to predict user responses to system behavior, and to eventually make
predictions about the user's interaction with environmental stimuli.
• Update the user affect model. This model must be inherently dynamic in order to
reflect the user's changing response patterns over time. To this end, the system will be
sensitive to changes in the user's meta-patterns as it begins to receive new kinds of
data from the Recognition module. Similarly, the Understanding module's learning
agents will receive feedback from both Application and Interface modules that will
inform changes to the user model. This feedback may consist of indications of levels
of user satisfaction--whether the user liked or disliked the system's behavior. This
feedback may come either as direct feedback from the user via the interface, or
indirectly by way of inference from how an application was used (e.g. the way that
application X was used and then terminated indicated that the user may have been
frustrated with it).
These user responses will help to modify the Understanding module's model of the
user and, therefore, the recommendations for system behavior that the Understanding
module makes to the rest of the system.
• Build and maintain a user-editable taxonomy of user preferences, for use in
specific circumstances when interacting with the user. For example instructions not to
attempt to communicate with the user while she/he is extremely agitated, or requests
for specific applications during certain moods--i.e. "Start playing melancholy music
when I've been depressed for x number of hours, and then start playing upbeat music
after this duration." This taxonomy may be eventually incorporated into the user
model; however, ultimately, the user's wishes should be able to override any modeled
preference.
• Feature two-way communication with the system's Recognition module. Not
only will the Recognition module constantly send updates to the Understanding
module, but the Understanding module will also send messages to the Recognition
module. These messages may include alerting the Recognition module to "look out"
for subsequent emotional responses that the Understanding module's model of the
user's meta-patterns predicts. Other kinds of Understanding-module-to-Recognizing-
module messages may include assisting the Recognition module in fine-tuning its
recognition engine by suggesting new combinations of affect response patterns that
the user seems to be displaying. These novel combinations may in turn inform novel
patterns in the user's affect that may be beyond the scope of the Recognition engine to
find on its own.
• Eventually build and maintain a more complete model of the user's behavior.
The more accurate a model of the user's cognitive abilities and processes can be built,
the better the system will be at predicting the user's behavior and providing accurate
information to the other modules within the system.
• Eventually model the user's context. The more information the system has about
the user's outside environment, the more effective the interaction will be, as will be
the benefit to the user. A system that knows that the user is in a conversation with
someone else may not wish to interrupt the user to discuss the user's current affective
response. Similarly, a system that can tell that the user has not slept in several days, is
ill or starving or under deadline pressure, will certainly be able to communicate with
much more sensitivity to the user.
• Provide a basis for the generation of synthetic system affect. A system that can
display emotional responses of its own is a vast, distinct area of research. The
Affective Understanding module described here may be able to inform the design of
such systems. And, once built, such a system could be integrated into the Affective
Understanding module to great effect. For example, a system that is able to display
authentic empathy in its interaction with the user might prove even more effective in
an Active Listening application than a system that shows artificial empathy (looks like
empathy to the user, but the machine doesn't really feel anything).
• Ensure confidentiality and security. The understanding module will build and
maintain a working model and record of the user's emotional life; eventually, this
model may also record other salient, contextual aspects of the user's life. Therefore,
perhaps more so than any other part of the affective computing system, the affective
understanding module will house information that must be kept confidential.
SYNTHESIZING EMOTION
Synthesizing emotions in machines and with this, building machines that not only
appear to "have" emotions, but also actually do have internal mechanisms analogous
to human or animal emotions is the next step. In a machine, (or software agent, or
virtual creature) which "has" emotions, the synthesis model decides which emotional
state the machine (or agent or creature) should be in. The emotional state is then used
to influence subsequent behavior. Some forms of synthesis act by reasoning about
emotion generation. An example of synthesis is as follows: if a person has a big exam
tomorrow, and has encountered several delays today, then he/she might feel stressed
and particularly intolerant of certain behaviors, such as interruptions not related to
helping prepare for the exam. This synthesis model can reason about circumstances
(exam, delays), and suggest which emotion(s) are likely to be present (stress,
annoyance).
The ability to synthesize emotions via reasoning about them, i.e. to know that certain
conditions tend to produce certain affective states, is also important for emotion
recognition. Recognition is often considered the "analysis" part of modeling
something -- analyzing what emotion is present. Synthesis is the inverse of analysis --
constructing the emotion. The two can operate in a system of checks and balances:
Recognition can proceed by synthesizing several possible cases, then asking which
case most closely resembles what is perceived. This approach to recognition is
sometimes called "analysis by synthesis." Synthesis models can also operate without
explicit reasoning. Researchers are exploring the need for machines to "have"
emotions in a bodily sense. The importance of this follows from the work of Damasio
and others who have studied patients who essentially do not have "enough emotions"
and consequently suffer from impaired rational decision making. The nature of their
impairment is oddly similar to that of today's Boolean decision-making machines, and
of AI's brittle expert systems. Recent findings suggest that in humans, emotions are
essential for flexible and rational decision-making. Our hypothesis is that they
emotional mechanisms will be essential for machines to have flexible and rational
decision making, as well as truly creative thought and a variety of other human-like
cognitive capabilities.
INTERFACES TO AFFECTIVE SYSTEMS
Once we begin to explore applications for affective systems, interface design
challenges and novel strategies for human-computer interaction immediately begin to
suggest themselves. These design challenges concern both hardware and software. In
terms of software, the human interface to applications can change with the increased
sensitivity that the affective sensing/recognizing/understanding system will bring to
the interaction. In terms of hardware, the design challenges present themselves even
more immediately.
For example, various bio-sensors and other devices such as pressure sensors may be
used as inputs to an affective computing system, perhaps by placing them into mice,
keyboards, chairs, jewelry, or clothing, things a user is naturally in physical contact
with. Sensing may also be done without contact, via cameras and microphones or
other remote sensors. How will these sensors evolve into the user's daily life? Will
sensors be embedded in the user's environment, or will they be part of one's personal
belongings, perhaps part of a personal wearable computer system? In the latter case,
how can we design these systems so that they are unobtrusive to the user and/or
invisible to others? In either case, consideration for the user's privacy and other needs
must be addressed. So the design of the interface is very important to all concerned
since the interface to the user will determine the utility more than the actual
complexity of the system.
The best type of interfaces would be using wearable interfaces. Wearable computers
are entire systems that are carried by the user, from the CPU and hard drive, to the
power supply and all input/output devices. The size and weight of these wearable
hardware systems are dropping, even as durability of such systems are increasing.
Researchers are also designing clothing and accessories (such as watches, jewelry,
etc.) into which these devices may be embedded to make them not only unobtrusive
and comfortable to the user, but also invisible to others.
Wearable computers allow researchers to create systems that go where the user goes,
whether at the office, at home, or in line at the bank. More importantly, they provide a
platform that can maintain constant contact with the user in the variety of ways that
the system may require; they provide computing power for the all affective computing
needs, from affect sensing to the applications that can interpret, understand and use
the data; and they can store the applications and user input data in on-board memory.
Finally, such systems can link to personal computers and to the Internet, providing the
same versatility of communications and applications as most desktop computers. A
prototype affective computing system, which is currently being developing in MIT,
uses a modified "Lizzy" wearable is described below. Researchers plan to create a
uniform set of affective computing hardware platforms, both to conduct affect
sensing/recognizing experiments, and to develop eventual end user systems. An
example of this hardware system is shown below. The computer module itself is five
and a half inches square (about the length of a pen), by three inches deep. It runs the
Linux operating system. The steel casing can protect the computer in falls from
heights up to six feet, even on hard surfaces like concrete. This system is durable
enough that it can withstand occasional blows, knocks, even the user's accidentally
sitting on various parts of the system without damage.
APPLICATIONS OF AFFECTIVE SYSTEMS
Perhaps the most fundamental application of affective computing will be to form
next-generation human interfaces that are able to recognize, and respond to, the
emotional states of their users. Users who are becoming frustrated or annoyed with
using a product would "send out signals" to the computer, at which point the
application might respond in a variety of ways -- ideally in ways that the user would
see as "intuitive".
Beyond this quantum leap in the ability of software applications to respond with
greater sensitivity to the user, the advent of affective computing will immediately lend
itself to a host of applications, a number of which are described below.
 Affective Medicine
Affective computing could be a great tool in the field of medicine. Stress is an
emotion, which is widely felt by all of us in this world of technology that forces us to
pick up a pace, which is higher than what we can handle. Stress is a big killer also.
Studies have indicated that stress is a big factor affecting health. It has been shown
that people who are more stressed out have lower resistance to diseases than a normal
person. It is also noted that the most stressed out people are those who use high-end
technology. So if computers and other devices were to interact with their users on an
affective level, it might help to bring down and control stress and consequently help
the health of the users.
Another use of affective system is to train Autistic children. Although autism is a
complex disorder where children tend to have difficulty with social-emotional cues,
they tend to be poor at generalizing what they learn, and learn best from having huge
numbers of examples, patiently provided. Many autistics have indicated that they like
interacting with computers, and some have indicated that communicating on the web
“levels the playing field” for them, since emotion communication is limited on the
web for everyone. Current intervention techniques for autistic children suggest that
many of them can make progress recognizing and understanding the emotional
expressions of people if given lots of examples to learn from and extensive training
with these examples.
Another application, which has been designed, is to use affective computers to collect
details about the condition of patients when they visit a physician. Today, physicians
usually have so little time with patients that they feel it is impossible to build rapport
and communicate about anything except the most obviously significant medical
issues. However, given findings such as those highlighted here emotional factors such
as stress, anxiety, depression, and anger can be highly significant medical factors,
even when the patient might not mention them.
In some cases, patients prefer giving information to a computer instead of to a doctor,
even when they know the doctor will see the information: computers can go more
slowly if the patient wishes, asking questions at the patient’s individual speed, not
rushing, not appearing arrogant, offering reassurance and information, while allowing
the physician more time to focus on other aspects of human interaction. Also, in some
cases, patients have reported more accurate information to computers; those referred
for assessment of alcohol-related illnesses admitted to a 42% higher consumption of
alcohol when interviewed by computer than when interviewed for the same
information by psychiatrists.

 Affective Tutor
Another good application for affective computer is to impart education to students.
Computers are widely being used to impart quality education to students. But most of
these CBT’s or Computer Based Tutorials are either linear, that is they follow a fixed
course, or they are based on the ability of the student which is gauged from the
response of the student to test situations. Even such a response is very limited.
An affective tutor on the other hand would be able to gauge the students
understanding as well as whether he is bored, confused, strained or in any other
psychological state which affects his or her studies and consequently change its
presentation or tempo so as to enable the student to adjust just as a human teacher
would do. This would consequently increase the student’s grasp of the subject and
give a better overall output from the system.
 Affective DJ
Another application, which has been developed, is a digital music delivery system that
plays music based on your current mood, and your listening preferences. This system
is able to detect that the user is currently experiencing a feeling of sorrow or
loneliness and consequently select a piece of music which it feels will help change the
mood you are in. It will also be able to make changes in your current play list if it
feels that the user is getting bored of the current play list or that the music has been
able to change the affect of that person to another state. Another promising
development is a video retrieval system might help identify not just scenes having a
particular actor or setting, but scenes having a particular emotional content: fast-
forward to the "most exciting" scenes. This will allow the user to be watching a scene,
which has his or her favorite actors, and also which suit the user’s current mood.
 Affective Toys
In the age where robotic toys are the craze of the time affective toys will soon enter
the toy world to fill in the void that the robots are unable to show or have emotions
and have to be attributed to them by an imaginative child. Affective toys on the other
hand will have emotions of their own and will be able to exchange these emotions
with the child, as a normal human child would do. The most famous affective toy is
The Affective Tigger, which is a reactive expressive toy. The stuffed tiger reacts to a
human playmate with a display of emotion, based on its perception of the mood of
play.
 Affective Avatars
Virtual Reality avatars that accurately and in real time represent the physical
manifestations of affective state of their users in the real world are a dream of hard-
core game players. They would enjoy the game more and also feel more a part of the
game if their Avatars would behave just like they would in a similar scenario. They
would like their Avatar to be scared when they are scared, angry when they are angry
and also excited whenever they feel excited. Work has been progressing in this
direction.
For example, AffQuake is an attempt to incorporate signals that relate to a player's
affect into ID Software's Quake II in a way that alters game play. Several
modifications have been made that cause the player's avatar within Quake to alter its
behaviors depending upon one of these signals. For example, in StartleQuake, when a
player becomes startled, his or her avatar also becomes startled and jumps back.

Many other applications have risen with continuing research in this field. More and
more possibilities are opening up every day.

CONCLUSION
In this seminar I have tried to provide a basic framework of the work done in the field
of affective computing. Over the years, scientists have aimed to make machines that
are intelligent and that help people use their native intelligence. However, they have
almost completely neglected the role of emotion in intelligence, leading to an
imbalance on a scale where emotions are almost always ignored. This does not mean
that the newer research should be solely to increase the Affective ability of the
computers. It is widely known that too much emotion is also as bad possibly worse
than no emotion. So a lot of research is needed to learn about how affect can be used
in a balanced, respectful, and intelligent way; this should be the aim of affective
computing as we develop new technologies that recognize and respond appropriately
to human emotions. The science is still very young but is showing large amounts of
promise and should provide more to HCI than did the advent of GUI and speech
recognition. The research is promising and will cause Affective computing to be an
essential tool in the future.

REFERENCES
• J. Scheirer, R. Fernandez, J. Klein, and R. W. Picard (2002),
"Frustrating the User on Purpose: A Step Toward Building an
Affective Computer"
• Jonathan Klein, Youngme Moon and Rosalind W. Picard (2002), "This
Computer Responds to User Frustration"
• Rosalind W. Picard, Jonathan Klein (2002), "Computers that
Recognise and Respond to User Emotion: Theoretical and Practical
Implications"
• Rosalind W. Picard and Jocelyn Scheirer (2001), "The Galvactivator:
A Glove that Senses and Communicates Skin Conductivity"
• Carson Reynolds and Rosalind W. Picard (2001), "Designing for
Affective Interactions"