Rosalind Picard

Founder of MIT's Affective Computing Research Group and cofounder of Affectiva

• Born: May 17, 1962
• Place of Birth: Boston, Massachusetts

Primary Company/Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Introduction

Rosalind Picard, founder and director of the Affective Computing Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab, wrote Affective Computing(1997), the seminal textbook in the field she helped establish. Affective computing is computing that relates to or influences emotion and other affective phenomena. Picard, professor of media arts and sciences at MIT, is also codirector of the Things That Think Consortium, an association, begun in 1995, of more than fifty companies and research groups with an interest in embedding computation into the environment and everyday objects. She also cofounded Affectiva, Inc., in 2009 to provide emotion-measurement technologies to companies, corporations, agencies, and universities. An inventor in addition to her other roles, Picard holds patents on several sensors, algorithms, and systems related to affective computing.

Early Life

Rosalind Wright Picard was born on May 17, 1962, in Boston, Massachusetts. She was adopted as an infant and grew up in Boston; Monterey, California; Key West, Florida; Keflavik, Iceland; and Atlanta, Georgia. She has one brother, Rob Wright. Her father, an engineer, fostered her interest in mathematics; her mother was a teacher. Picard credits both her parents with giving her a sense of security and self-worth and with instilling in her a love of learning and a belief in her ability to tackle tough projects.

Picard received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering with highest honors from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1984. She earned a master of science degree in electrical engineering and computing in 1986 and a doctor of science degree in electrical engineering and computing in 1991, both from MIT. From 1984 to 1987, she worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories, where she designed very-large-scale integration (VLSI) chips for digital signal processing and developed new methods of image compression and analysis.

Life's Work

Picard joined the faculty of MIT in July 1991 as assistant professor of media technology. Her early work in MIT's Media Lab involved content-based retrieval of images and video. She codeveloped the Photobook system, a set of interactive tools for browsing and searching images and image sequences that allows flexible, intuitive searches of large databases. Her work in this area was described as pioneering, and she was amassing an impressive string of publications and proving her worth as a fund-raiser, bringing in more than a million dollars in research funds. In the mid-1990s, her research focused on signal-processing technology and how it could be used to improve computer cognition. Later, she became interested in the connections between reason and emotion. The more she discovered, the more convinced she became that the intelligent machines engineers dreamed of creating were possible only if designers understood the importance of emotions. In 1997, she wrote Affective Computing, laying the groundwork for a new field of research that uses technology to understand and directly influence emotion and other affective phenomena.

The new field was not without its detractors. Experts in artificial intelligence generally preferred systems that relied solely on rules to those that involved emotions, which most considered nonessential to intelligence. Picard's argument was that computers should be designed to consider, express, and influence users' emotions. Artificial intelligence, she believed, had placed a disproportionate emphasis on verbal and mathematical intelligences while for the most part ignoring the significant role of social-emotional intelligence. In 1995, Picard renamed her research group in MIT's Media Lab the Affective Computing Group.

Other scientists found her ideas provocative, and by 1999 MIT's Media Lab had become the center of affective computing. Picard led the first development of technology that interpreted and responded empathetically to affect in such things as posture, face, gesture, physiology, and task behavior. The products that she and her colleagues developed held the promise of applications in fields as far ranging as autism studies and customer service. Among these is a glovelike device that can measure emotions via skin conductance. Picard and one of her graduate students also used software linked to an ordinary webcam to measure heart rate, blood pressure, and skin temperature without surface contact with the body. Dr. Rana el Kaliouby, a visiting scientist with the Affective Computing Group, and Picard have worked together to create glasses that enable the wearer to analyze the facial expressions of a conversation partner. Employing a camera the size of a grain of rice and software developed by Picard, the glasses record twenty-four “feature points” and analyze them. The device has been used effectively with autistic people and others who often find reading emotional cues from others extremely difficult. Picard is quick to point out that these devices serve only to amplify cues that are voluntarily given and do not extract information from unwilling participants.

Picard also serves as cofounder and director of the Autism and Communication Technology Initiative at the MIT Media Lab. Researchers in this group are engaged in the development of innovative technologies that contribute to autism research and therapy. They are particularly interested in creating technologies that improve communication and promote independent living in autistic people. Often technologies developed to help those on the autism spectrum prove to have applications for other groups as well. Wireless wristbands, for example, which were developed to show levels of emotional stress in autistic people, have also been used successfully to signal early signs of seizures in epileptics and to monitor sleep patterns of those with sleep disorders, a problem common among autistic children but not limited to them.

In April 2009, Picard and el Kaliouby founded Affectiva, Inc. The company was a natural extension of the collaborations with sponsors in the research conducted in the MIT laboratory. Picard has said that she and her cofounder were approached by people interested in using their technology in applications in clinical research for a variety of problems other than autism, including obesity, substance abuse, stress and anxiety disorders, and epilepsy. Research also made clear that the technologies held applications for distance learning, market research, professional training, and other fields. Once a product proved its effectiveness and adaptability, commercial markets were viable. Affectiva, based in Waltham, Massachusetts, began by marketing the Q Sensor, a device worn on the wrist to measure emotional arousal using skin conductance, temperature, and activity, and Affdex, glasses that use a webcam to read facial expressions. Q Sensors have been successfully used to help caregivers and educators working with autistic children, with veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and with drug addicts. They are expected to have commercial applications in a wide range of areas, including therapy, education, and market research. Affdex promises to give marketers useful, accurate insights into consumer responses to advertising and media and to deliver the insights more quickly than other means. The products are being used by Fortune 500 companies, advertising agencies, and academic researchers at Stanford, Harvard, and Notre Dame. Picard serves the company as chair and chief scientist, and she is also the cofounder and chief scientist of Empatica, Inc. In 2024, the company announced the release of Embrace, the first AI-based smartwatch with an FDA clearance for seizure monitoring.

Picard was granted tenure at MIT in 1998. She was named a full professor in 2005. She is the author of approximately two hundred scientific articles and chapters in books. She holds multiple patents for sensors, algorithms, and systems for sensing, recognizing, and responding to human affective information. She is recognized as an international leader in innovative technology in her field and is a popular keynote speaker for professional conferences and public forums.

Personal Life

Picard married Len Picard in 1988. They are the parents of three sons, Michael, Chris, and Luc. Formerly a self-described “staunch atheist,” Picard converted to Christianity and has been vocal about her faith, her dislike of religiosity, and her belief that it is possible to be both a hard-core scientist and a committed Christian.

Picard was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers for contributions to image and video analysis and affective computing in 2005. She has served on the Advisory Committee for the National Science Foundation's (NSF's) division of Computers in Science and Engineering (CISE), the Advisory Board for the Georgia Tech College of Computing, and the editorial board of User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction: The Journal of Personalization Research. She has frequently been engaged as a consultant by such companies as Apple, AT&T, Hewlett-Packard, iRobot, and Motorola. The Social-Cue Reader developed by Picard and el Kaliouby was among the New York Times Magazine's Best Ideas of 2006, and a mirror that monitors vital signs was on Popular Science's Top Ten Inventions of 2011. She was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2019. In 2021, Picard was elected to the National Academy of Inventors, and in 2022. she was awarded the International Lobmardy Prize for Computer Science Research.

Bibliography

Adee, Sally. “Your Seventh Sense.” New Scientist 2 July 2011: 32–36. Print.

Daviss, Bennett. “Tell Laura I Love Her.” New Scientist 3 Dec. 2005: 42–46. Print.

Durham, Tony. “A HAL of a Way to Take the Chip off Marvin's Cold Shoulder.” Times Higher Education Supplement 1323 (1998): III. Print.

Ming-Zher, Poh, Nicholas C. Swenson, and Rosalind W. Picard. “A Wearable Sensor for Unobtrusive, Long-Term Assessment of Electrodermal Activity.” IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering 57.5 (2010): 1243–52. Print.

Picard, Rosalind W. Affective Computing. Cambridge: MIT, 1997. Print.

Stephens, Christiana Nielson. "Scientists and Engineer Rosalind Picard Transforming Digital Health with Wearable AI." Success Magazine, 12 Jan. 2024, www.success.com/professor-rosalind-picard-empatica-embrace/. Accessed 7 Mar. 2024.