Social Interface

 Prof. Alex (Sandy) Pentland, MIT Media Lab
    pentlandmedia.mit.edu

Seminar on People, Computers, and Design
Stanford University November 4, 2005

Social psychologists have demonstrated that humans are able to accurately judge the attitudes and intentions of other people from a few dozen seconds of tone of voice, body language, and gesture. Moreover, people are largely unconcious of the signaling that supports these judgements, and the mechanism has received little attention from psychologists. I have developed a theory of this social signaling, and shown that computers can use these signals to accurately estimate people's interest, attraction, depression, and stress, and to predict outcomes in dating, salary negotiations, business networking, poker, etc. Interfaces can make use of these signals to help with personal health, social networking, wealth generation, and general quality of life.

For more detail, see the paper Socially Aware Computation and Communication IEEE Computer, March 2005

Prof. Alex (Sandy) Pentland is a pioneer in wearable computers, health systems, smart environments, and technology for developing countries. He is a co-founder of the Wearable Computing research community, the Autonomous Mental Development research community, the Center for Future Health, the international Digital Nations Consortium, and was the founding director of the Media Lab Asia. He was formerly the Academic Head of the MIT Media Laboratory, and is the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences. He was chosen by Newsweek as one of the 100 Americans most likely to shape the next century. He currently directs the Human Dynamics research group at the MIT Media Lab. For additional detail see the individual project web pages

View this talk on line at CS547 on Stanford OnLine

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