View source for Talk:Affective computing

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I generally agree with the peer reviewer on the article being basically informative. I would however suggest that there are a few important aspects that should be addressed to improve its value (some of which overlap partially with recommendations put forward by the peer and not yet addressed in a fully satisfactory manner).

(1) I am generally missing a critical stance towards the field as a whole, and regarding the state of the art in the different areas addressed. Issues connected to the introduction of such technologies as a whole should not be washed over lightly (<-- please DO forgive me for exaggerating with my formulations, this of course is to be understood for the sake of making my point only!); and the known technical and theoretical difficulties and limitations ought to be explained more clearly. In this context, a short explanation of the evolution of the field so far (including e.g. the understanding/correction of the use of 'emotion' vs. 'affect') would be helpful, as well as a succinct the explanation and underscoring of the genuine _novelty_ of the research field (in comparison to established emotion research in psychology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, etc.): relevant results are scattered all over these different fields, and the mapping of the full richness of "emotional life" to what is covered in the different fields is very incomplete. Of course there are also methodological reasons:

It could therefore be worthwhile to report some aspects regarding "Psychology 101" and human research: E.g., as also experienced e.g. within Humaine, basics of good practice of research concerning/involving humans are often not taught in the context of engineering curricula, even at globally leading institutions; the inherent difficulties of singling out, measuring and modelling psychological quantities, and of releasing technologies interacting with humans - as humans will inevitably adapt to whatever technology they are exposed to and there thus e.g. is no "full undoing" of released solutions, and there are fundamental methodological issues that have to be considered.

The _well-known_ "incompleteness" of existing emotion theories also relates to the second-but-last paragraph of the section "Research scope and challenges": it is not so surprising after all that "subdued" should not be covered in "the dominant psychology theories" (if this is in fact the case? the relation of the notion of "subdued" to terminology in sociology and emotion research should be scrutinised with care) -- cf. e.g. Clark Elliott's extension of the OCC model for pedagogical purposes reported in

  Elliott C.: Affective Reasoner personality models for automated tutoring
  systems, Proc. Workshop on Pedagogicalk Agents, 8th World Conference on
  Artificial Intelligence in Education (AI&ED-97), Kobe, Japan, 1997.
  (available online [2008-06-22] at http://condor.depaul.edu/~elliott/papers/aied97/aied97.html) 

(2) Some coverage of ethics has been introduced at the location suggested by my peer. But given both, the horizontal (=pervasive) nature of ethical concerns, as well as the need to establish it as core, routine, and *monitored/supervised* principle, I would suggest that it should be allocated a section of its own.

As aspects to be addressed (list not meant to be exhaustive!), we would suggest:

* Procedural _and_ outcome issues:

. procedural: how to carry out research; basics of human research: informed consent; ethics committees; the importance of the researcher _not_ being the sole/main judge of a proposed research activity, etc.

.  outcome: what are the consequences if research is successful and products are released? What kind of educational, legal, and _social_ scaffolding (which stakeholders, ...) is required? How can it be achieved?

* Symmetrical aspects: abuse of affective technology (i.e., e.g.: abuse of affectively sensitive ECAs by humans)

* The impact of scope and context of use (i.e. the "semi-intelligent information filter" issue: for this kind of technology in particular, how can it be ensured that all premises for inferences and functions in fact do hold? How is the technology to operate when these do not hold?)

* The scope and limitations of ethical clearance: assessments of ethicality of research...products need to be revisited (i.e. there's no "once-and-for-all" ethical clearance)


(3) The references need to be examined with care, making sure the individual records are complete: many entries lack the title of the paper (!), as well as issue numbers (in particular for the recommended special journal issues); page numbers are missing for Breazeal & Picard 2006 and Burleson et al. 2004.
Furthermore, the references need to be linked with the article text at the appropriate/related places.
We are also not sure about classifying the ACII proceedings as "recommended reading" (at least, we would suggest to group the two entries under a heading such as "Affective computing and intelligent interaction conference proceedings").

Some further more detailed/local comments have been inserted in the article text.