The Technology of Emotions
With an understanding of the science of emotions, we wanted a perspective on the technology surrounding the software. We were able to arrange this Q&A with Charles Guerin, CEO of Canadian I & A Research, Inc. on his revolutionary system EMIR (the Emotional Model for Intelligent Response).
ZDNet Australia: Charles Guerin, thank you for particpating. Lets begin by asking the question: How and why did you decide to develop the EMIR (Emotional Model for Intelligent Response)?
Charles Guerin: EMIR was originally developed out of an odd circumstance. I was part of a development team that had just delivered a control system that monitored temperature in large stadium-sized rooms for millions of dollars worth of fruit. One day, we got a call from the owner who started yelling that our system had frozen thousands of dollars of grapes overnight. He was having a fit, and was extremely angry. When I got there, I noticed that the system had reported bizarre temperatures that were obviously screwey, but the midnight staff upon viewing the bad readings hadn't responded to them! The numbers and graphs were all obviously wrong...but they hadn't elicited any reaction from the human operators!
The bug turned out to be simple - a bad ground on a sensor, but I kept thinking about the operators who ignored the readouts, thinking, "If they had only felt the full depth of the owner's emotion, they would have certainly responded quicker". It dawned on me that perhaps the problem with automated systems was that they didn't really seem to "care" about whatever it was they were controlling. We simply reduced all readouts to numbers or cryptic messages, instead of the simple emotions that humans are trained from birth to respond to.
I looked around to try to find an existing system for simulating human emotion, and found that none existed. After around six months of researching many different models of emotion, I developed a theory of analysis that when it met up with the work of Dr. Mehrabian, formed into a very elegant solution.
Q: People talk about the emotional components of intelligence. Do you consider emotion to be a critical component of intelligence?
A: Intelligence relies on emotion. Without emotion, you can't have intelligence...all you can have is "data", data that is difficult to communicate and difficult to understand. I think emotion helps us derive intelligence from information in three important aspects-
1- Emotion adds a lot of subtle information content to any situation
2- Emotion helps us to remember information.
3- Emotion-laden information is understood FASTER than data.
If you look at a bird and think "That is a bird, and it's blue, and it's making a sound"...you are being a robot, analyzing and developing "DATA".
If you look at the same bird and think "what a beautiful bird, of such rich blue color and such a fabulous voice" and feel some tingling pleasure inside...that is being an intelligent human and you are developing "INFORMATION" which is of much deeper meaning to another human than the "bird was blue".
Another important aspect of emotion in intelligence is memory. Memories tend to be strongly linked with emotion states, and the stronger the emotion state, the stronger and longer lasting the memory. Think September 11th or the day that Kennedy was shot, and everyone can tell you where they were and what they did. Ask them what they ate for breakfast yesterday, and there was likely little emotional impact, thereby no memory.
In terms of speed, consider your mother mentioning "Your room requires cleaning" versus "Clean your room, now, or else!"... and you'll grasp how the latter example will elicit a more rapid response, though the data was there in the first instance.
Q: Can you tell us about your favourite application of EMIR, or a use for it that you would like to see fulfilled?
A: There are many applications I'd like to see. In particular, I'd like to see applications that help people with emotional disorders understand and deal with their emotions. Software could be built to help children focus and expand their breadth of emotion and feelings.
The obvious commercial uses of EMIR lie in computer games and environmental simulators, but I believe that we may see the day when emotion is just another API, another tool for communication that is part of every operating system.
Q: Did the EMIR system produce any unexpected results during development?
A: EMIR is always surprising, often hilarious, and sometimes uncanny. Robby, the emotional thermostat, was the first "real-situation" test of our theory, the first few hours running live were very special. We initially had messed up the accuracy of some of the internal mathematics and were getting sort of random results that were fun, but not accurate. Our programmers were rolling on the floor with some of the light scripts we'd given Robby to say to enunciate the various emotions. "I'm relaxed, thinking of my vacation in Lake Tahoe".
However, as soon as we fine tuned it, the feeling was "wow", Robby started to respond with the same descriptive terms a human would use, in the right situation, he was getting nervous at the right times, scared, and going through an emotional regime that was perfectly natural... and that's when the hairs on the back of my neck went up and I realized we were onto something.
The Robby demo seemed to "care"!
An interesting aspect of this convincing demo was that all emotions were deduced from only 2 input pieces of data - the temperature and whether a cooling motor was on or off....and some fancy math.
Q: Could you give us an example of a practical difference between the decision making of an AI system with and without emotions?
A: Sure, let's say that you have a verbot (a talking robot) that is programmed to learn from talking to you about your interests and knows that you enjoy flying airplanes. You start to tell the verbot that you intend to fly today. The verbot checks out an online weather database and notices light rain followed by thundershowers in the area where you want to fly. In a classical decision making system, the verbot might decide that IF "Thundershowers" THEN Warn-User.
Programmed with EMIR the system would feel "concerned and worried" about the light rain, and ask you if you would change your flight plan? If you said no, the system might get more aggressive, even angry about not being able to help you. In short, the difference is that emotion systems make it a lot easier to simulate 'caring' and manage subtle information situations, very well.
Q: Is is possible to design a certain personality for the EMIR system?
A: Yes, definitely....at least that aspect of "personality" that is affected by emotional response and tendencies.
Q: Could the unique personality of a person be copied using the system?
A: Well, not really someone's "personality". The emotion response to situations though can be mimicked very effectively though using the mathematics of EMIR.
Q: What can you tell us about emotional voice inflection, where a computer generated voice can be altered to communicate particular emotional feelings. Have you seen this in action?
A: Yes, actually I've seen 3 different voice generators that do a good job of synthesizing emotion into voice. Our technology is an excellent input device for taking "real world" situations and using them to control that type of technology.
Q: Do you think emotional voice inflections could be universally applied to computer-generated speech without pre-recording every word and sentence?
A: Definitely. At first I expect that you'll see simple systems that are "cute and interesting", and then advanced systems that add a lot of emotion inflection to speech systems.
Q: Can you imagine a future where this exists?
A: I have this one nightmare that someday my refrigerator and my washing machine are going to get into a heated debate over whether it's 12:01 am or 12:02 am and scream at each other all night.
Charles Guerin is the Chief Executive Officer at I & A Research Inc., based in Canada. Charles Guerin and I & A Research Inc. developed the EMIR system, based, in part, on the theoretical work of Dr Albert Mehrabian.
Previous page: The Science of Emotions: our Q&A with Dr Albert Mehrabian, of UCLA.
1%
1%
