Mikhail Romadin, detail from cover illustration for Your Name? Robot, 1979. (Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic)

How will our future computers, robots, and smartphones get the emotional intelligence they need to be truly useful? 

During an August 30 SFI Community Lecture in Santa Fe, researcher and author Rosalind W. Picard highlighted her adventures exploring some of the world's first technologies that recognize human emotion and shared her team’s unexpected findings about the power of wearable technologies to help treat autism, anxiety, depression, and epilepsy, improve driver safety, enhance customer experience, and more.

Watch her talk (68 minutes, August 30, 2016)

Picard is the founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the MIT Media Laboratory, a pioneer in the field of human-computer interaction, and co-founder of two technology companies. Her inventions were recognized by the New York Times Magazine's Best Ideas List in 2006 and Popular Science's Top Ten Inventions for 2011. 

Read Pasatiempo's preview of Picard's lecture (August 26, 2016)

SFI Community Lectures are free and open to the public. Generous underwriting from Thornburg Investment Management, with additional support from The Lensic Performing Arts Center, makes this series possible.

View the complete listing of upcoming SFI Community Lectures.