AAAS Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion

Biography

Rosalind W. Picard is founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Laboratory and is co-director of the Things That Think Consortium. Picard earned Master and Doctorate degrees, both in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1986 and 1991, respectively. In 1991 she joined the MIT Media Laboratory as an Assistant Professor, and in 1992 was appointed to the NEC Development Chair in Computers and Communications. She was promoted to Associate Professor in 1995, and awarded tenure at MIT in 1998.

The author of over a hundred peer-reviewed scientific articles in pattern recognition, multidimensional signal modeling, computer vision, and human-computer interaction, Picard is known internationally for pioneering research into digital libraries and content-based video retrieval. She is co-recipient with Tom Minka of a "best paper" prize (1998) from the Pattern Recognition Society for their work on interactive machine learning with multiple models. Dr. Picard guest edited the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence special issue on "Digital Libraries: Representation and Retrieval", and edited the proceedings of the First IEEE International Workshop on Content-Based Access of Image and Video Libraries, for which she served as Chair. Her award-winning book, Affective Computing, (MIT Press, 1997) lays the groundwork for giving machines the skills of emotional intelligence.