[Music] [Applause] this talk is about emotional artificial intelligence it's a relatively new field in research in artificial intelligence but it has a great potential to do immense good to people for people however the technology can be misused and in this talk I want to make a point that actually it is up to us the consumers of this technology who will decide whether the technology will be used for good or for evil but let me first explain what emotional artificial intelligence is really about so emotional artificial intelligence goes by various names affective computing is one of
those another one is human centric artificial intelligence but actually behind all of those names is exactly the same research topic automatic sensing and analysis of human behavior and in particular human facial behavior human face is really fascinating we use the face to recognize other members of our species to recognize other people use the face also to judge various things such as age gender beauty and sometimes even personality don't do the last one most importantly the human face is the only observable window of our inner selves of our emotions intentions attitudes and moods it is therefore
not surprising that in the recent years we had a surge of interest in this technology and if we could I mean the reason is that if we could detect the faces in various naturalistic scenes and then analyze the facial expressions of those phases in terms of specific emotions or specific attitudes we could use this kind of technology for a very wide number of applications the state of the art in the field is relatively advanced so we do have and we did develop a number of techniques that could detect and track the phases in various and
realistic scenes we also do have the tools that can detect track and measure the intensity of various facial gestures such as frowns and smiles we also can automatically analyze higher-level behaviors such as certain emotions and certain attitudes like interest however the methodology and the technology is not fully matured so we still have great problems in dealing with occluded faces with dealing with faces which where we observe large changes in head position especially fast changes in head position very small faces make problem to us and also our typical facial expressions such as the expressions of the
lady enjoying her skydive however the technology is matured enough to be used in a large number of really great applications so let me just give a couple of examples of those the first example I want to talk about is use of emotional artificial intelligence in therapies with autistic children the human face displays 10,000 different facial expressions 7,000 of which we display on a daily basis typically developing people classify those expressions in maybe 15 or 20 categories however autistic children means this generalization ability so 7,000 facial expressions that we express on a daily basis they see
a 7,000 different categories this is the reason why autistic children usually do not look at our faces they are too confusing for that but this is also the reason why they can not understand what are our facial expressions when we try to express that we are sad or we are upset or we are happy this is also the reason why they cannot learn what are those expressions that they should display when they want to say that they are happier they are upset so that typically-developing people can understand them and hence the breakage in communication so
one of the major goals of behavioural therapy with autistic children is to give them the tools the skills to actually express the emotions in a way that typically-developing people can understand and also to understand what are the emotions of others around them and one of the problems with this is that when you have a human teach a child these typical expressions humans like and usually emphasize things so when they teach the child you know when you are happy you smile they usually raise the eyebrows and most of you probably didn't notice that at all right
but actually for autistic child a smile with raised eyebrows is a very different expression than just a smile so this is where we came to the idea to use the robots instead of human therapists because you can program the robot and the expression that the robot will show will always be the same expression right so when the therapist says you know can you display a happy facial expression or how would you feel if you get a train then the robot complies and shows this smiley expression the child sees this expression repeats the expression and then
the robot because it recognizes that the child display the correct facial expression gives a positive feedback so this is the way you can use the robots in this iterative loop of behavioral therapy with autistic children autistic children love robots they actually love all mechanical toys which are built of parts and exactly this love is something that can have a really amazing effect on children so the district herb boy that you have previously seen suffers from rather severe attention deficit however after this session with robot his daily supervisor who is this guy in the background said
to us that he has never seen the boy more attentive in a whole year right similarly when we brought the robot to Serbia to have a session with Serbian autistic children we had this boy who is a nonverbal child interacting with with a robot when we say a nonverbal autistic child this doesn't mean that the child cannot speak it means that the child chooses not to speak but after this session you see he was really like happy and he was really enjoying his time with the robot and after the session he went home and said
to his mom and tomorrow in school the robot he said to his mom so the mother of course immediately wrote to us and said what did you do like this is amazing it was it was for her an unbelievable awakening and this kind of awakenings is actually what makes the robot worthy of putting into the therapies with autistic children and this is what makes our research on this topic fully worthwhile another case and a very good application of emotional artificial intelligence technology is the case of automatic sensing and flagging behavioral cues of depression depression is
a huge problem currently in Western world we are having an increase of depressed people at all age levels however with teenagers this is the worst in USA and UK we currently have 25 percent of teenage girls suffering from this illness overall 17 percent of young adults aged 18 to 22 suffer from depression it is very similar the case with the elderly population in UK we have 22% of people above 65 years of age who suffer from depression the worst part is it actually only one out of ten of these elderly people are officially helped by
UK national health services so it would be really fantastic if we would have tools that could actually detect these signs behavioral cues of depression and flag them to GP or to the family members when you talk to people about depression they often may say to you you know depressed people do not smile that often but it is not at all the case it is not a frequency it is really the quality of the smiles depressed people feel usually embarrassed if they smile so their smiles are short-lived and they are often dampened another problem is the
negative bias so whatever you say to a depressed person they will actually interpret it more negatively than the intention was let me ask you something what do you think this lady is currently watching a very typical answer is that she's watching some kind of horror movie but actually we asked her to watch funny videos she's watching the videos of kids and cats running around but due to her negative bias she has these very strong expressions of fear and even disgust her smiles are really so subtle that the intensity of them are barely detectable and it
is exactly this the cumulative effect of all those behavioral signals that we plot on this lined plot at the bottom of the vida so emotional artificial intelligence can be used for great purposes really to help people to help humanity but it can also be misused let me give you an example in the sample 2017 Facebook patented a camera the camera will be placed in shops and shopping malls it will recognize people by their profiles in facebook currently Facebook has 1.4 billion profits also the camera will know what are the search patterns that the people exhibited
on Facebook and on Google so they will know what we like or what we are interested in furthermore the camera will watch our behavioral signals in the shop what do we like to which departments do we go most often and based on all of this the price will be customized so the more you search for something the more you like something the price will be higher the worst part is actually that neither medicines nor medical care nor medical services are excluded from the pattern so if somebody is ill insert is a remedy online and has
a Facebook account that person will unfortunately pay much higher prices for this medical remedy although again emotional artificial intelligence can be used for really great purposes and great good it can be badly misused but it is especially the case if we carelessly and blindly give our data our behavioral data to certain companies so this is exactly what's happening nowadays I mean you go to any website they ask you to clicking except these cookies right what are the cookies the cookies are actually the search patterns of what you do what did you search to which website
you went how many times you visited that website what did you purchase how many times you purchase that so they have four behavioral pattern of your purchasing behavior then we go to this Facebook we open the profile we put our pictures with P to put our children's picture we put our friends then we tag everybody we put videos so they give everything they have the faces they have the behavioral patterns they have how we smile which is a dynamic thing right they have can we walk what makes us happy where we go most often so
then you go back to their part and then you realize how harmful that can be so the message for today really is be aware get informed you don't have to click on all of these cookies all the time you can actually scroll without accepting the cookies take care what kind of information you give away and keep your own data for your own thank you [Applause] [Music] [Applause]
