Building HAL: computers that sense, recognize, and respond to human emotion

The HAL 9000 computer, the inimitable star of the classic Kubrick and Clarke film "2001: A Space Odyssey," displayed image understanding capabilities vastly beyond today’s computer systems. HAL could not only instantly recognize who he was interacting with, but also he could lip read, judge aesthetics of visual sketches, recognize emotions subtly expressed by scientists on board the ship, and respond to these emotions in an adaptive personalized way. Of course, HAL also had capabilities that we might not want to give to machines, like the ability to terminate life support or otherwise take lives of people. This presentation highlights recent research in giving machines certain affective abilities that aim to make them more intelligent, shows examples of some of these systems, and describes the role that affective abilities may play in future human-computer interaction.