Week 3 Reading and Homework

Sign up!

With one or more of your ideas and prospective project team-mates, go to Roz's appointment calendar Links to an external site. and sign up for a 20 min slot Thurs, Fri, or Mon to discuss your project plans by zoom with her (default location for all meetings w/her is her zoom room:  mit.zoom.us/my/rwpicard ). Links to an external site.If you need a time/slot that is not shown, then mail  times your team can make (evenings or Sun pm may also work for Picard) with subject:  "MAS.630 URGENT please Schedule" to both aragons@media.mit.edu and to picard@media.mit.edu

Read:

Affective Computing: Chapter 2 pages 50-55 and all of Chapter 6 (note p. 175 should also credit the origin of facial actions to the Swede Carl-Herman Hjortsjö not to Paul Ekman, who with Walter Friesen and other collaborators extended and popularized  Hjortsjö's work and built the "Facial Action Coding System")

Homework

Please upload a .pdf file named name.pdf (where name is your first and last name) with responses to the following questions:

Question 1: Reflect on how you perceive others' emotions and how this would compare to a computer: (a) share one example of when you find emotion EASY to recognize (b) what inputs do you think a computer would need to recognize it?  (c) in what situation do you think the computer is most likely to succeed?  (d) in what situation is it most likely to fail? 

Question 2: Reflect on how you perceive others' emotions and how this would compare to a computer: (a) share one example of when you find emotion HARD to recognize (b) what inputs do you think a computer would need to recognize it?  (c) in what situation do you think the computer is most likely to succeed?  (d) in what situation is it most likely to fail? 

Question 3: After reading these articles, you will note a controversy that the general (non-scientific) public tries to simplify in a very binary and polarizing way:  Can a person’s affective state be reasonably inferred from that person’s facial movements or not -- yes or no?  Suppose you will be on stage with an activist demanding, "Ban affect recognition because it does not work -- it has no sound scientific basis." The activist justifies the science part of this claim by citing the Barrett et al. paper as evidence that emotion recognition does not work.  ("Affect" is slightly broader than emotion, but you can treat them roughly synonymously here.)  While we'll dig into some additional reasons to ban aspects of this technology later, for now just focus on its scientific merit and do not go into any of the other reasons.  (a) Respond to the activist's criticism in your own words - feel free to agree or disagree. Write for the general public in this part. (b) State in a sentence or two, in your own words, the most negative criticism of the Barrett et al paper and respond to it - feel free to agree or disagree.   Write for fellow scientists in this part.

Question 4:  Finalize your project partner team and make a joint project plan, ideally for one project, but if you still have two and are trying to decide then that is fine.   Like last week, answer (i),(ii), and (iii) for at most two ideas.  If these are the same as what you sent last week, then find and add to each one a few key references of related work in the literature (give full citations and a link to their extended abstract or pdf).  If you're struggling to settle on a team and 1 idea, make sure you meet w/Picard (and also feel free to meet with Groh) as soon as possible so we can help you.  In class on Wed, Sep 23, you will be asked to present 3mins/person on your idea (6 mins for a 2-person partnership) so everyone in the class can share ideas they may have to help you succeed.  If  this part of your homework is completely covered by your slides, just say that here and then you can upload your slides by the start of class on Wed.  (No need to put the same content here on Tues.)   I'll send a "separate assignment" in canvas for that upload, but it's the same as this part of your homework.  Later, we'll be asking everyone for some references related to their project, so it's not required this week, but it will be required later, so if you're searching on them now, start saving the search results.