Rational intelligence and emotional intelligence are not supported together by the state-of-the-art computing paradigms. Even the so called Artificial Intelligence (AI) has so far no worthy claims in regard to emotional intelligence to computers, and it has become a moot question as to whether affective computing is, in fact, possible in toto. This paper presents the emerging trends and applications of affective computing vis-à-vis other related paradigms of Human Computer Interaction (HCI). We analyze the chasm in the theory of affective computing systems and the practicability with the available technological support. The field has potential applications in regard to Web service design, e-learning, HCI, wearable computers and e-commerce. The work presents issues that give essential details of the next generation computers and software systems that know how and what you feel.
Traditional HCI is based on cold, logical machines which use passive instruments such as keyboard, mouse, touch screen, joystick, etc. They cannot understand, express or process emotions. Rather, the state-of-the-art computers are expected to be human-like machines which can communicate/interact with humans in a natural and harmonious way. Emotions are peculiar to humans. Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction form an emerging AI paradigm to enable computers to observe, understand and synthesize emotions, and to behave vividly. In Psychology, `affect' refers to emotion. Affective computing deals with the design of HCI devices which can detect, process, and respond to user's emotions and other stimuli. This is also known as emotive computing. It is an interdisciplinary field covering various fields such as computer science, psychology and cognitive science. An affective device gathers cues to user emotions from a variety of sources. The user's emotional state is captured by facial expressions, posture, gestures, speech, the force or rhythm of key strokes, and the temperature changes in the position of the hand holding the mouse, etc. These can all be detected and interpreted by a computer. Affective devices have a built-in camera that captures images of the user. Algorithms are used to process the data to give meaningful, affective information.
In reallife situations, pure reasoning and logic are found insufficient to account for true intelligence. In the real world, unpredictable events could be countless. Given an infinite number of possible ones and a set of premises, there is hardly any time to determine which action is best to choose. In humans, emotional systems are influenced by important cognitive processes such as salience determination, focus and attention, priority determination, interruption in emergency situation, memorization, goal generation, goal attribution, categorization and preference. They are all quite important now for AI systems. |
