Social-Emotional Intelligence Prosthetic

The proposed project is the first of its kind: its design and strategy are original and potentially powerful for aiding people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (who are impaired in their ability to perceive social-emotional cues) and for improving understanding of the role of social-emotional communication in natural human interaction.

The project will advance the ability of machines to infer cognitive affective states from nonverbal expressions of people engaged in natural interaction, and will enable the context of the perceiver to begin to be exploited in improving performance of real-time perceptual inference algorithms. The proposed system will expand social-emotional perceptual and communicative capabilities of machines and will be a significant first step toward aiding people who have need of help with these capabilities now. Being the first prosthetic assistive technology that is designed to augment a person's lack of or impairment in socio-emotional intelligence skills, the project has the potential to lead to a line of new research.