ECE Seminar: Affect and Technology: Designing Applications to Support Personal Growth

Can technology play a role in supporting personal growth? This is one of the many questions that has been asked in affective computing, a field influenced by electrical and computer engineering, psychology, cognitive science, and education. Affective computing researchers utilize pattern analysis, signal processing, and machine learning to extract affective information from physiology, facial expressions, speech, body posture, and other visible and "invisible" signals that human beings express. In this talk, I will provide a broad vision for the field as a whole, as well as present specific software applications my team and I are developing to support emotional self-awareness, empathy development, and digital dating abuse prevention.