Courses:

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

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.

• 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

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.

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.

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