Social and Emotional Intelligence in AI and Agents

July 18, 2017
Mary Czerwinski; Justine Cassell; Jonathan Gratch; Daniel McDuff; Louis-Philippe Morency | Microsoft; Carnegie Mellon University; University of Southern California; Microsoft; Carnegie Mellon University

Social signals and emotions are fundamental to human interactions and influence memory, decision-making and wellbeing. As AI systems, in particular, intelligent agents, become more advanced, there is increasing interest in applications that can fulfil tasks goals, social goals and respond to emotional states. Research has shown that cognitive agents with these capabilities can increase empathy, rapport and trust with their users, amongst other things. However, designing such agents is extremely complex, as most human knowledge of emotion is implicit/tacit and defined by unwritten rules. Furthermore, these rules are culturally dependent and not universal. This session will focus on research into intelligent cognitive agents. It will cover the measurement and understanding of verbal and non-verbal cues, the computational modeling of emotion and the design of sentient virtual agents.