Rosalind Picard

AI is so much more than a buzzword. Yet, for many, even the basics are shrouded in mystery. This session functions as MIT professor Rosalind Picard’s primer on AI essentials, from its power and limitations in the workplace to why AI hype so often confuses us. She provides guidance to companies seeking to understand what inputs they can give to AI, how to achieve desired outputs and why they should consider the technology as another tool in their toolbox. By deconstructing AI myths and bringing users into the conversation, Picard makes AI accessible to everyone.

Could you live a healthier, happier life if computers could measure and help communicate emotion? MIT professor and world-renowned visionary Rosalind Picard, creator of wearable sensors and other emotion-recognizing technologies, has been exploring and articulating what is possible in this area. In this presentation, she examines AI as an instrument for forecasting levels of health and happiness and highlights cutting-edge research to explain how wearable sensors collect statistics related to stress, anxiety, pain and joy. By teasing out differences between what the data shows to be causal versus merely correlative, she walks participants through the latest science on predicting health. With deep examinations of how AI impacts the management of autism, anxiety, depression, sleep and epilepsy, Picard illustrates how new capabilities might reveal complex interdependencies of emotions and health, and even help prevent future disease.

Technology is increasingly designed in the image of people, often with skills that recognize and respond to human emotion expressed in voices, faces, text, physiology and other behaviors. Software agents and robots are made to appear to have their own emotions, but it’s just a simulation, says MIT professor Rosalind Picard. Today, AI developers have an opportunity to be part of ongoing conversations around the ethics of AI, including its use in medicine and how it can contribute to the greater good. In this interactive session, Picard explains the beneficial uses of affective technologies, highlights current and emerging trends and addresses related challenges and ethical questions.

Artificial intelligence has the capacity to improve many areas of our lives, but, we have to be careful about how we use it. In this talk, digital health expert, inventor and MIT professor Rosalind Picard – pioneer of Affective Computing – outlines the many ways technologies can serve us as individuals and as a society. She highlights how human-AI partnerships can help address a range of problems, including mitigating bias and bad habits, treating illnesses such as autism and epilepsy, helping marketers better understand audiences, and helping car makers design safer cars.

MIT professor Rosalind Picard likes to think of mental health partially in terms of an emotional bank account, where deposits and withdrawals must be roughly equal to maintain balance. Drawing on evidence-based techniques from Positive Psychology, Picard explains how AI-enabled technologies can help us consciously inject positivity into our day in order to stave off depression, promote emotional resilience and make us more empathetic and grateful. She then highlights AI-based tools people can use every day to improve mental health, boost productivity and promote well-being.