Emotional AI: Comparative Considerations for UK and Japan across Commercial, Political and Security Sectors

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CONTEXTEmotional AI comprises affective computing and AI techniques to sense human emotional life. Using weak AI rather than strong AI, machines read and react to emotions via text, images, voice, computer vision and biometric sensing. Emotional AI is an emergent phenomenon appearing across diverse devices and life contexts. Examples include: city sensing such as ads that analyse faces for emotional reactions; analysis of sentiment on social media (used for policing, political campaigning, marketing); wearables that track moods of workers; and human-machine interaction (eg home assistants). A leading technology analyst, Gartner, predicts that by 2022 personal devices will know more about a person's emotional state than their family. Emotional AI raises important social questions, esp. on how data about online feeling, bodily affects, physiological expression, attention and intention should be used. Harms include: privacy violations, unauthorised uses of data about emotions, visibility of private thoughts, hidden influence, lack of scope to opt-out of monitoring of emotional behaviour, and impact on self-conception of emotional identity.AIMS/OBJECTIVESTo bring together in interdisciplinary fora 40 UK and Japanese academics, industry, NGOs and regulators to better understand the constitution, and commercial/civic/security implications, of a world where emotional AI is increasingly central. Through this network, we will identify pressing cross-cultural research projects on emotional AI, sensitive to culture, policy, ethics, technological trends and industrial context. We will hold workshops in Japan (2 x 2-day) and London (1 x 1-day). Each involves inter-disciplinary academics, NGOs, policy-makers, industry and technologists (15-20 high value people/workshop drawn from Japan/UK):- Japan Workshop 1 (Emotional AI - Commerce & Civic Life) will focus on the emergence of emotional AI, and its commercial and civic dimensions. - Japan Workshop 2 (Emotional AI - Security & Civic Life) will examine the role of emotional (and wider) AI, in security, predictive policing and surveillance.- UK Workshop 3 (Emotional AI & Cross-Cultural Considerations) will brief UK academics/stakeholders (incl. start-ups) on what has been learnt from our interactions in Japan, providing insights and cross-cultural considerations of emotional AI and its application to commercial, civic and security issues. This workshop will be held at Digital Catapult, the UK's leading agency for early adoption of advanced digital technologies. Through the 3 workshops, we will meet stakeholders in Japan/UK who can be brought in on grant ideas.Following the workshops, we will develop grant bids to UK funders. To achieve this, the UK-based Principle Investigator (PI) and Co-Investigator (Co-I) will spend 26 days in Japan; the UK-based Early Career Researcher (ECR) will spend 21 days in Japan; 2 other UK-based academics will each spend 6 days in Japan; and the Japan-based International Co-I (ICo-I) will spend 19 days in UK.Deliverables:- 3 workshops (2 in Japan, 1 in UK): Japan workshops will have simultaneous bilingual translation.- New grant applications to AHRC, ESRC, EPSRC or Innovate UK with Japan ICo-Is and UK/Japan end users.- Bilingual website to inform/attract participants/stakeholders.- Bilingual blog entries written by workshop participants to provocations posed by workshop leaders.- A written report on insights/recommendations.APPLICATIONS/BENEFITSWe will:- Raise UK/Japanese stakeholder awareness (technology industry, policy-makers, NGOs) of the need to understand, and be involved in, cross-cultural (UK-Japan) interdisciplinary research on emotional AI and its commercial/civic/security implications.- Establish a deep collaborative UK-Japan interdisciplinary, multi-end user network on emotional AI, building cross-national research capacity.