Toward an affective intelligent machine system: theory and application

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Intelligent machine systems refer to machines that can exhibit the traits found in humans, such as learning, reasoning, decision-making, sensing, and adaptation. The contemporary intelligent machine system has excluded emotion, which thus fundamentally compromises the degree of intelligence within the system because the emotion affects our capability of information processing, decision making, and memory. This research program aims to develop a better understanding of what and how the emotion affects our decision making process. The research will be conducted in two typical application domains (i.e., driver-vehicle and elderly-robot systems) in order to demonstrate the generality of the proposed research; they are chosen due to their broad impact to our society.    There are two general questions to be answered through this research program. The first question is what would be some significant effect on the human behavior when the machine he or she interacts with has emotion and shows its emotion. The second question is how the machine and human co-control a human-machine system to further improve its performance.    The proposed research will generate knowledge to answer these questions. Specifically, we will first develop a methodology to construct the emotional expression of a machine to be the same as that of a human and examine how this emotional expression affects the human emotion and cognition. Second, we develop several models that can represent the relationship between the emotion and performance of the human when he or she interacts with the machine. Last, we develop methodologies for the machine to intelligently assist the human in controlling the human-machine system; assistances include more understanding of what happens in the machine, offering advisory message, and taking actions over the human when needed.    Intellectually, this research will further advance our knowledge on building intelligent machine systems. This research will generate great social benefits to public safety and health.