Stork: You work on affective computing. Tell us what affective computing is.
Picard: Affective computing is computing that relates to, arises from, or deliberately influences the emotions. Our work in affective computing focuses on giving the computers the ability to recognize your emotion when you're in front of the machine. To occasionally express emotions when that's appropriate, and to in some sense have the mechanisms of emotion.

Stork: Now, HAL had emotions?
Picard: HAL gave the appearance of having emotions. In fact there's a wonderful dialogue in the film where the BBC asks Dave, does HAL have emotions? He answers that he believes that HAL has the appearance of them but nobody really knows whether HAL has emotions or not. Now, whether HAL really has emotions is somewhat of a philosophical question as well as a scientific question because scientists don't' agree on what emotions are, and until we can really define what they are we can't really say if he has them or not.

Stork: Do you have a working definition of emotions?
Picard: We use, as a working definition of emotions, the intuitive notion of emotions. Definitions of emotions differ in nuances as to whether or not they have physical or logical components. In general, we believe emotions consist both of thoughts, that can be quite logical, and feelings that can happen with or without conscious awareness. We think of emotions in the same intuitive way that people who don't study emotions think about them. In general, we think of emotions as having both a physical component that may involve a facial expression or some tense muscles, as well as a cognitive component that that tends to involve some thoughts. Emotions can be quite rational involving thoughts such as 'he wronged me', 'he got in my way therefore I'm angry at him', or they can involve feelings that you may not even be aware of.

Stork: So why do humans need or have emotions?
Picard: Emotions play a number of important roles both in human communications for helping us understand what's going on with one another. They also play a lot of very important roles we only recently just been discovering. In fact, neuroscientists have been involved in some very exciting findings about how emotions play important roles that we're not even aware of. Very subtle emotions that you may be having, things you might even call just intuitions help to guide your problem solving, your creativity, your memory retrieval, and basic decision making from day to day, and without those very subtle emotions that you hardly even notice, you could become quite impaired cognitively, and appear rather stupid.

Stork: How did HAL recognize and express emotions?
Picard: It is interesting to note that HAL appeared to be the most emotional character in Ô2001'. The scientists were relatively unexpressive. HAL gave the appearance of having emotions even though he didn't gush forth with them until the final scene when he repeated to Dave as Dave was disassembling ÔI'm afraid Dave, I'm afraid'.

Stork: How did HAL recognize the emotional state of the crew members?
Picard: We don't know how HAL recognized the emotional state of the crew members, except that we know that HAL had visual capabilities and the ability to understand speech. We think he paid attention to patterns in the speech. There's some hinting of that in the book. We know now that certain aspects of emotion can be recognized from speech. The overall excitement level of a person is easy to discern from pitch and amplitude characteristics of the speech. However, it's very hard to tell the positive and negative aspects of emotion from speech. That's more easy to discern from the facial expression as well as from the content that was said if that was clearly positive or negative. It's possible that HAL had some other sensing abilities which we don't really know about, they're not made clear in the film. Certainly, computers today can sense other signals from people such as the warmth emanating from their body. The muscle tension in how they move. Computers that are wearable and on your person can sense things from the surface of your skin that presumably HAL was not having access to.

Stork: How different are emotional states from cognitive states?
Picard: There are still some arguments among researchers and emotion theorists about whether emotions are primarily cognitive states, or physical states, or something in between. I think when there's an argument about two extremes the truth is somewhere in the middle. In fact, we find certain kinds of emotions that are created mainly among your thoughts and others that seem to overtake your body before you even have any thoughts that indicate your awareness of them. I don't think of emotions as purely thoughts or as purely cognitive states but if you stretch the definition of cognition to anything that happens in the brain, then emotions will fall into that.

Stork: How would affective computing reach the average computer user?
Picard: We see signs of affective computing already sneaking into the systems that are out there. In fact, Macintosh, or Apple, has for a long time snuck a little smiley face there as the machine boots up. And, when the machine expresses even that rudiment of satisfaction that all is going well upon a boot-up, that's a sign of an affective interaction, even though a very trivial one. What we see too with the office systems that Microsoft has been putting out is an attempt recognize if all is going well with the user. But a very limited attempt, and also a great insensitivity to whether the user likes that or not. If the system expresses some emotion but doesn't recognize and respond appropriately to it then its sort of like somebody who you're showing you're irritated at, and they don't even notice, they keep on doing what they're doing and it only drives you even crazier.

Stork: So how do you design systems to be sensitive to emotion or to express them?
Picard: We've been designing a number of systems that don't so much express emotion as try to indicate that they're beginning to understand a tiny bit of what the user is trying to express. So for an example, we built a system that deliberately frustrated people, and as people got really frustrated, they expressed a lot of irritation. We had a study where the computer either ignored the person's emotions, or asked about them but did nothing about them, or asked about them and then tried to respond to them with the computer equivalent of empathy. We found that when the computer showed a little bit a acknowledgement of the person's emotion, a little bit of empathy, say Ôgee that sounds like a crummy experience' then the users were significantly more likely to go back and want to interact with the computer again.

Stork: Can you tell us a little more aboutÉdo you train it, do you try and map human emotions directly onto it?
Picard: There are many approaches to trying to facilitate the emotional interaction between people and machines. From very simple scripted interactions to open-ended situations where it is very hard to know how to respond. Computers are lacking common sense still which means, unless the situation is fairly tightly bounded, we're likely to drift off into a very unnatural situation and interaction. Right now it's very hard to handle the unpredictable with emotions, but if you can deal with a fairly predictable set of them, like you're pretty sure that the user's going to be frustrated here, let's ask the user if that's the case, then we can respond quite well to that.

Stork: Why is this such a hard problem?
Picard: Dealing with emotions is an extremely difficult problem. In part because most of them are just very subtly expressed. In 2001, the astronauts, the human characters almost never express overt emotions and yet HAL senses that Dave is stressed and how he does that is a little bit of a mystery. From the voice, or from muscle tension. But somehow, through the very subtle communication of emotion it's picked up and responded to. In the film he tells Dave to take a stress pill, which is a questionable response, maybe today you would show a little bit of empathy first and try to talk about it. We are exploring many different situations in which emotions would arise and you can begin to understand them. In general, it's very difficult for a number of reasons. One is because we don't have accurate reading of what the person's expressing. Emotions consist not just of your facial expressions, gestures, vocal expressions and so forth, but also your thoughts. You might be quite happy about something inside but trying to portray a sense of sadness or sympathy for somebody. You might be quite angry about something but trying to mask that. So, in general, emotions can be quite complicated and you have to understand a lot about them when you're trying to interpret what is being expressed.

There's a scene where the AE35 malfunctions and Frank and Dave confront HAL about this and HAL sort of acts like HAL hasn't made any mistake and then we see Dave smile and we know that that smile is not a smile of joy because we can analyze not just the expression on his face but the situation. It's not clear how HAL interprets that smile. It's a complex situation to analyze both what's going on and to look at the face.