Courtesy of Rosalind W. Pickard, Sc.D.

Curiosity Expert: Rosalind W. Picard, Sc.D.

Founder and Director, Affective Computing Research Group, MIT Media Lab

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Professor Rosalind W. Picard, Sc.D., is founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Laboratory, co-director of the Things That Think Consortium, the largest industrial sponsorship organization at the lab, and leader of the new and growing Autism & Communication Technology Initiative at MIT. She is co-founder, chief scientist and chairman of Affectiva, Inc., making technology to help measure and communicate emotion.

Picard holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering with highest honors from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and master's and doctorate degrees, both in electrical engineering and computer science, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Prior to completing her doctorate at MIT, she was a Member of the Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories where she designed VLSI chips for digital signal processing and developed new methods of image compression and analysis. In 1991 she joined the MIT Media Lab faculty. She became internationally known for constructing mathematical texture models for content-based retrieval of images, for creating new tools such as the Photobook system, and for pioneering methods of automated search and annotation in digital video. The year before she was up for tenure, she published the award-winning book, Affective Computing, which was instrumental in starting a new field by that name. Picard has been awarded dozens of distinguished and named lectureships internationally and in 2005 was honored as a Fellow of the IEEE for contributions to image and video analysis and affective computing.

The author of nearly two hundred scientific articles and chapters in multidimensional signal modeling, computer vision, pattern recognition, machine learning, human-computer interaction, and affective computing, Picard is an international leader in envisioning and inventing innovative technology. She is recipient of a best paper prize for work on machine learning with multiple models (with Tom Minka, 1998), and recipient of a best theory paper prize for work on affect in human learning (with Barry Kort and Rob Reilly, 2001). She holds multiple patents, having designed and developed a variety of new sensors, algorithms, and systems for sensing, recognizing, and responding respectfully to human affective information, with applications in autism communication, human and machine learning, health behavior change, marketing, advertising, customer service, and human-computer interaction.

Picard has served on dozens of international and national science and engineering program committees, editorial boards, and review panels, including the Advisory Committee for the National Science Foundation's (NSF's) division of Computers in Science and Engineering (CISE), the Advisory Board for the Georgia Tech College of Computing, and the Editorial Board of User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction: The Journal of Personalization Research.

Picard interacts regularly with industry and has consulted for companies such as Apple, AT&T, BT, HP, i.Robot, and Motorola. She is a popular keynote speaker, and her group's achievements have been featured in forums for the general public such as the New York Times, the London Independent, National Public Radio, Scientific American Frontiers, ABC's Nightline and World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, Time, Vogue, Wired, Voice of America Radio, New Scientist, and BBC's The Works and The Big Byte. Picard lives in Newton, Massachusetts with her husband and three energetic sons.