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Rosalind W. Picard is director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the MIT Media Lab, and co-director of the Things That Think Consortium, the largest industrial sponsorship organization at the lab. Picard is the author of Affective Computing, published in 1997. In 2005, she was named a Fellow of the IEEE.

Biography

Professor Picard holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering with highest honors from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and master's and doctorate degrees, both in electrical engineering and computer science, from MIT. She has been a member of the faculty at the MIT Media Laboratory since 1991, with tenure since 1997.

Picard is a pioneering researcher in the field of affective computing and the founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the MIT Media Lab. The Affective Computing Research Group develops tools, techniques, and devices for sensing, interpreting, and processing emotion signals that drive state-of-the-art systems which respond intelligently to human emotional states. Applications of their research include improved tutoring systems and assistive technology for use in alleviating autism.

MIT's press release for Picard's textbook, Affective Computing, states, "According to Rosalind Picard, if we want computers to be genuinely intelligent and to interact naturally with us, we must give computers the ability to recognize, understand, even to have and express emotions."

"A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism"

In February 2006, the New York Times reported that Picard was one of a small number of nationally prominent researchers, out of five hundred scientists and engineers, whose names appeared on the Discovery Institute's controversial petition, "A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism". The two-sentence statement has been widely used by its sponsor, the Discovery Institute, and some of their supporters in a national campaign to discredit evolution and to promote the teaching of intelligent design in public schools.

Neither Picard's original field of electrical engineering nor her current field of affective computing is related to evolutionary biology. Writer Ed Brayton, co-founder of "Michigan Citizens for Science" and the The Panda's Thumb website, writes that:

And consider the fact that the majority of people on the list are in fields that have no relevance to evolutionary biology at all. A chemist or a physicist or a doctor has no more specialized knowledge of biology than a sociologist or a mechanic for that matter. This is not only an appeal to authority, it is an appeal to non-existent authority. Of course, the last thing the ID advocates should be engaging in is such appeals to authority, especially in light of the fact that well over 99% of scientists in the relevant fields accept evolution. If you're going to appeal to the authority of a tiny percentage of scientists, most of them obscure names in fields with no connection to evolution, it seems rather silly to reject an appeal to the overwhelming opinion of those scientists who actually work in the field.

— 

Bibliography

• Affective Computing, Rosalind Picard, (MIT Press, 1997)
• T.P. Minka and R.W. Picard (1997), "Interactive Learning Using a 'Society of Models,'" Pattern Recognition, Volume 30, No. 4, pp. 565-581, 1997. (Winner of 1997 Pattern Recognition Society Award)
• B. Kort, R. Reilly and R.W. Picard (2001), "An Affective Model of Interplay Between Emotions and Learning: Reengineering Educational Pedagogy-Building a Learning Companion," In Proceedings of International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT 2001), August 2001, Madison, WI. (Winner of Best Paper Prize.)

References

1. Media Lab Faculty Biography
2. Publication of Affective Computing
3. IEEE Fellows of the Class of 2005
4. MIT Faculty Biography Page
5. Research Projects of the Affective Computing Research Group
6. Affective Computing Group Web Page
7. Current and Past Projects
8. ^ MIT Press Publication of Affective Computing
9. ^ Few Biologists but Many Evangelicals Sign Anti-Evolution Petition, Kenneth Chang, New York Times, February 21, 2006.
10. Signatories of 'A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism'
11. Doubts Over Evolution Mount With Over 300 Scientists Expressing Skepticism With Central Tenet of Darwin's Theory
12. Forrest, Barbara (May,2007), Understanding the Intelligent Design Creationist Movement: Its True Nature and Goals. A Position Paper from the Center for Inquiry, Office of Public Policy (PDF), Washington, D.C.: Center for Inquiry, Inc., retrieved 2007-08-06 {{citation}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)CS1 maint: date and year (link).
13. Does Seattle group "teach controversy" or contribute to it? Linda Shaw. The Seattle Times, March 31, 2005.
14. See fields of science (or alternately NSF Fields of Science Codes and associated explanatory information) for an exposition of the general, hierarchical, relationship of scientific fields.
15. Bradfield on Evolution, Ed Brayton, Dispatches from the Culture Wars, Science Blogs, February 13, 2007 9:19 AM
16. Publications in Affective Computing

External links

• Affective Computing Group Web Page
• Things That Think Consortium Web Page
• Rosalind (Roz) W. Picard Homepage
• MIT Course on Autism Theory and Technology

• 1962 births
• Living people
• American computer scientists
• Women computer scientists
• Electronics engineers
• Artificial intelligence researchers
• People from Massachusetts
• Georgia Institute of Technology alumni
• Signatories of "A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism"
• Fellows of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers