Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Emotional Intelligence – What’s it All About? (19th June 2018)

Or perhaps, “Will I fall in love with a Chatbot while I’m complaining about my pizza delivery?”

By integrating emotional intelligence – EI – with the existing artificial intelligence, AI is taking a crucial turn on its journey to becoming a transformational technology; however, even the most sophisticated AI technologies lack essential factors like emotional intelligence and the ability to contextualize information as we do.

This is the sole reason why AI has not succeeded in taking over a major aspect of our careers and lives, so, infusing emotions, empathy, and morality into AI is the next milestone technologists wish to accomplish, and a considerable amount of effort is being put in the process. By the year 2020, artificial emotional intelligence is deemed to be a technological reality.

Artificial emotional intelligence is real; companies able to effectively incorporate contextual understanding and empathy into their technologies will become the front-runners in this race to technological excellence. However, they must also be cautious of the social and personal implications of such a huge transition.

Artificial emotional intelligence is real; companies able to effectively incorporate contextual understanding and empathy into their technologies will become the front-runners in this race to technological excellence.

In the next five years, artificial emotional intelligence is projected to grow into a multibillion-dollar industry, completely transforming industries, market research, innovation, R&D, and much more.

However, they must also be cautious of the social and personal implications of such a huge transition.

Our speaker today will describe ‘What is artificial emotional intelligence?’ and how the integration of EI with AI can be beneficial and what the future of artificial emotional intelligence looks like. We’ll also get to question and debate the social, societal and personal issues that will arise from this exciting – perhaps frightening – AI development.

Professor Maja Pantic

Professor Maja Pantic is one of the world’s leading experts in the research on machine understanding of human behaviour including vision-based detection, tracking, and analysis of human behavioural cues like facial expressions and body gestures, and multimodal analysis of human behaviours like laughter, social signals, and affective states.

Professor Pantic studied Mathematics in her native Belgrade, Serbia, but moved to Delft, the Netherlands, in 1992 to study Computer Science. She obtained her BSc, MSc and PhD degrees in Artificial Intelligence in 1995, 1997, and 2001, respectively, from Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands. Until 2005, she was an Assistant/ Associate Professor at Delft University of Technology. In 2006, she joined the Imperial College London, Department of Computing, UK, where she is Professor of Affective & Behavioural Computing and the Head of the iBUG group, working on machine analysis of human non-verbal behaviour.

In 2002, Professor Pantic was awarded a Dutch Research Council Junior Fellowship (NWO Veni) for her early work on automatic facial expression analysis and named one of the 7 best young researchers in the Netherlands in that year. In 2008, she received the very first European Research Council Starting Fellowship for her research on Machine Analysis of Human Naturalistic Behaviour (MAHNOB).

At that time only 2.5% of the applicants received an ERC Fellowship. In 2011, Professor Pantic received BCS Roger Needham Award, awarded annually to a UK based researcher for a distinguished research contribution in computer science within ten years of their PhD.

In 2012, Pantic was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers(IEEE) for contribution to automatic human behaviour understanding and affective computing. In 2016, she was named a Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR).

In 2016, she was chosen by the journal Nature to present “Machines That Can Read Human Emotions” at the World Economic Forum in Davos. In 2017, she was named “One of Ten Female Innovators To Watch” by the tech magazine WIRED.

Professor Pantic has been appointed as Research Director of the new Samsung AI Centre in Cambridge (SAIC), where she is responsible for the overall research programme and the strategy of the Centre.