Multimodal emotional intelligence for robots

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The SFU Rosie Lab (Robots with Social Intelligence and Empathy) aims to build robots and digital agents that can accurately identify our emotions and respond appropriately, towards seamless and humanistic interactions. According to a recent study of college students, empathy has decreased by over 40% over the last 30 years [1]. Researchers suggest that one likely contributor is high consumption of new media and technology through interfaces such as smartphones. What if technology and interfaces could be more human, instead of humans adapting to technology? What if machines could interact with compassion and kindness? Voice-activated digital assistants such as Amazon Echo and Siri are taking the world by storm, and personal robots are poised to be the next generation of helpful devices. In 2017, a study found that people expect the ideal personal robot to be more friendly, soft, honest, trustworthy, gentle, nice, peaceful, competent, happy, emotional, and sensitive compared to a general robot [2]. The proposed research aims to develop software necessary to build these friendly personal robots. Our software will be able to detect common social signals, such as boredom, excitement, frustration or curiosity. Using this software, and in collaboration with psychology labs, we aim to study how this interactive, empathetic technology can improve our happiness, well-being and social connectedness. Like Rosie the Robot from the Jetsons, the resulting robots are anticipated to be useful in domains such as healthcare and therapy, elder care, and education. Furthermore, we aim to build artificial intelligence software in a way that aligns with Canadian values, considering a diversity of expressions rather than one-size-fits-all. Finally, the students trained in the Rosie Lab will be uniquely poised to bring their specialized knowledge of emotion-aware computing to Canada's technological companies and the world. [1] Konrath, S. H., O'Brien, E. H., & Hsing, C. (2011). Changes in Dispositional Empathy in American College Students Over Time: A Meta-Analysis. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 15(2), 180-198. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868310377395 [2] Kuhnert, B., Ragni, M., & Lindner, F. (2017). The gap between human's attitude towards robots in general and human's expectation of an ideal everyday life robot. In Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), 2017 26th IEEE International Symposium on (pp. 1102-1107).