Affective Computing: Advancing Wellbeing Using New Ways to Communicate, Understand and Respond to Emotion

The Affective Computing group aims to bridge the gap between human emotions and computational technology. Current research addresses machine recognition and modeling of human emotional expression, including the invention of new software tools to help people gather, communicate, and express emotional information and to better manage and understand the ways emotion impacts health, social interaction, learning, memory, and behavior. Our projects are diverse: from finding new ways to forecast and prevent depression before there are any clear outward signs of it; to inventing ways to help people with special needs who face communication, motivation, and emotion regulation challenges; to enabling robots and computers to receive natural emotional feedback and improve human experiences. We advance the latest affective technology and machine learning analytics with applications that improve lives.