Student Researcher: Elie Eunyoung Shin (es285 at cornell dot edu)
Faculty: Phoebe Sengers

PROJECTS

• Affective Sensing and Graphics (Affector)
  As computers become more personal and even intimate, the interaction between humans and the computers plays an increasingly important role in our society. Computers have been a critical tool in business and science, but now it is time to use them to enhance relationships among friends, at work, and in society. Most research which has been done on this issue, however, uses an approach involving direct, physical sensing of emotion which many people may find intrusive. To address this issue, we make use of the principle of "intelligence without representation," pioneered by Rodney Brooks. This principle states that a computer can act as if it understands the world without internally representing it, simply through following stimulus-response rules. Our project, Affector, is a system that uses this principle to experiment with the possibility of communicating human emotions in real time, while protecting the privacy of those involved. It uses video image processing and image distortions: these distortions allow a user's emotions to be displayed visually without exposing the identity of the user, or other sensitive details.
  
  
• Fear Reflector
  People can be very subjective, especially when afraid, anxious, angry, or excited -- we often do not know what just caused us to feel fear, anxiety, or anger. Sometimes we regret these negative emotions and unnecessarily spend time worrying about them. If we could build a device that helped to us quantitatively measure our emotions, and thus allowed us to see more clearly their causes and deal with them logically, wouldn't it help us deal with many problems in our lives? Such a device could be used in situations such as a backpacking trip into the wilderness: the traveler does not know when a scary animal might jump out or attack him, and so he might be overly sensitive to every sound and object around him. If he used this device to reflect on his emotional states during the trip, he could realize and analyze, logically, where the problems lie, and learn to deal with them. The Fear Reflector project's goal is to enable such reflection and analysis, particularly of the fear state, and thus to help free our lives from negative and excessive emotions.