Collaborative Research: Closing the Affective Gap

我们的情绪和心情在我们的日常经历中起着核心作用。 为了设计更充分地参与人类体验的界面，一些研究人员现在提倡情感计算，其中计算机自动感知，处理和响应人类情感，但在没有用户明确意识和同意的情况下，计算机测量和报告亲密数据引起了人们对谁在控制方面的重大担忧。 此外，准确地感知受许多生理，个人和文化因素影响的复杂和难以捉摸的情绪是具有挑战性的，这些因素是计算传感器无法获得的，并且需要简化情绪以便对它们进行计算建模可能会导致界面扁平化我们的情感体验，而不是让我们的情感在日常生活中充分丰富。 这些问题是基于一个基本的情感差距，一个脱节的主观，情境，文化和社会的方式，人们认为和经验的情绪和客观，形式化的方式，计算机模型。 在这个项目中，PI将试图通过在人和机器之间分担情感解释的负担来缩小情感鸿沟。 在这个模型中，人和机器合作构建情感体验;机器跟踪用户行为并提供反馈，用户解释这些反馈以发展情感意识。 将解释和反思的中心从系统转移到用户身上，让用户负责情感意义的创造，解决计算系统无法真正理解的情感，并将我们的设计工作集中在丰富，复杂，独特和潜在的神秘情感体验上，而不是情感的形式化。 需要主动用户解释的系统对HCI的设计和评估提出了严峻的挑战，因为我们不再直接控制系统的意义，而是设计和评估意外的拨款。 从艺术、人文和批判性设计中汲取灵感，PI的系统将通过反映情感的复杂性和模糊性来鼓励解释，让人们在日常生活和关系的背景下积极理解系统的输出。PI将制定系统的设计和评估战略，理论基础，和详细的案例研究，使情感的存在可持续的，可再生的贡献，人机交互。 这项工作将带来新的技术，让用户负责解释他们的情绪，但允许构建涉及亲密问题的系统，而不会被侵入，支持用户对技术中影响作用的反思，并使设计师能够创造一种新的，广泛的情感体验，即使计算机很难模拟这些体验。

Our emotions and moods play a central role in our everyday experiences. To design interfaces that more adequately engage this full range of human experience, some researchers now advocate affective computing, in which computers automatically sense, process, and respond to human emotions, but having computers measure and report on intimate data without users' explicit awareness and consent raises substantial concerns around who is in control. Furthermore, it is challenging to accurately sense complex and elusive emotions influenced by many physiological, individual, and cultural factors that are unavailable to computational sensors, and the need to simplify emotions in order to computationally model them may lead to interfaces that flatten our emotional experiences rather than engaging our emotions in their full everyday richness. Such problems are based on a fundamental affective gap, a disjunction between the subjective, situated, cultural, and social ways in which people think about and experience emotions and the objective, formalized ways in which computers model them. In this project the PIs will attempt to close the affective gap by sharing the burden of affective interpretation between people and machines. In this model, people and machines collaborate to construct affective experiences; machines track user behavior and supply feedback, which users interpret to develop affective awareness. Shifting the center of interpretation and reflection from the system towards the user keeps users in charge of emotional meaning-making, addresses emotions that computational systems alone cannot truly understand, and focuses our design efforts not on formalizations of affect but on rich, complex, idiosyncratic, and potentially enigmatic emotional experiences. Systems requiring active user interpretation pose serious challenges for design and evaluation in HCI, since we no longer have direct control of system meaning but instead design and evaluate for unexpected appropriation. Drawing from the arts, humanities, and critical design, the PIs' systems will encourage interpretation by reflecting the complex, ambiguous nature of affect, allowing people to actively make sense of the system's output in the context of their everyday lives and relationships.Broader Impacts: The PIs will develop systematic design and evaluation strategies, a theoretical foundation, and detailed case studies that make affective presence a sustainable, reproducible contribution to HCI. The work will lead to new technology that leaves users in charge of the interpretation of their emotions yet allows construction of systems that touch on intimate issues without being intrusive, supports user reflection on the role of affect in technology, and enables designers to create a new, wide range of emotional experiences even though computers have difficulty modeling those experiences.