Read and summarize the text. Affective computing: How 'emotional machines' are about to take over our lives

Affective computing: How 'emotional machines' are about to take over our lives

In a quiet breakfast cafe, on a sunny October morning in Boston, I am watching a gang of five animated emotions control the thoughts of a little girl called Riley. On an iPad screen, the green character called Disgust gears into action, making Riley overturn her plate of broccoli in a fit of revulsion, and I gasp. When Riley’s father tries to pacify her by pretending her spoon is an aeroplane, I giggle. All the while, the iPad is reading my emotions.

‘Emotional engagement: HIGH’, the screen reads, once the 30-second clip of Pixar’s film Inside Out has ended. On a scale of one to 100, I mostly registered high levels of enjoyment, according to the iPad. During the bit where broccoli goes flying everywhere, my surprise levels go through the roof, mixed in with a little bit of dislike.

‘I didn’t see your face register any dislike; that must be a mistake,’ says my companion, the inventor of the emotion-reading app. ‘I don’t like broccoli, so I may have grimaced,’ I say, surprised that the app could pick up my micro-expressions.‘Aha!’ she says, pleased. ‘That’s what it’s really looking for.’

Showing off her invention, which has been 10 years in the making, is Rana el Kaliouby, an Egyptian-born computer scientist. El Kaliouby studied human-computer interaction in Cairo in 1993, before it became fashionable to analyse our relationships with our devices. "We used to talk about social robots that could respond to your emotions and it all seemed so far out. Computer cameras were massive webcams. But it only took about 10 years for it all to become real," she says.

The emotion-sensing app was built by her start-up Affectiva, which was spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) maverick Media Lab – a place where designers, computer scientists, artists, architects and neuroscientists pool ideas. Its ‘anti-disciplinary’ collaborations have led to products that belong firmly in the future – from foldable cars to social robots – and resulted in much-loved spin-offs such as Guitar Hero and the Kindle.

The idea behind Affectiva was to create a computer that could recognise a range of subtle human emotions, based on facial expressions. The company’s work is part of a now-growing field of research known as ‘affective computing’, the scientific efforts to give electronic devices emotional intelligence so that they can respond to our stubbornly human feelings and make our lives better.

Currently the big hype in computer science is around artificial intelligence – imbuing computers with the ability to learn from data and make rational decisions in areas such as financial trading or healthcare. From September to December 2014, just nine AI companies raised $201.6 million from Silicon Valley investors who all want in on the gold rush.

But scientists like El Kaliouby think emotion-sensing is as important for a machine’s intelligence as data-driven rationality. ‘It’s not just about human-computer interaction. I realised that by making machines have emotional intelligence, our own communication could become better,’ she says.

Today the idea has started to take root in the public imagination. Another Media Lab roboticist, Cynthia Breazeal, has built Jibo, a Disney cartoon-like family robot that can perform simple tasks such as reading a story to a child at bedtime or giving voice reminders from a to-do list. It recognises faces and can have simple conversations, and its emotions are powered by Affectiva software