Season 2 Episode 2: Roz Picard
Thank you for joining us for another episode of the Carver Cast! In today's episode, we sit down with Professor Roz Picard of MIT.
Rosalind W. Picard is a scientist and engineer, member of the faculty of MIT's Media Lab, founder and director of the Affective Computing research group at the MIT Media Lab, founding faculty chair of MIT's MindHandHeart Initiative, and a faculty member of the MIT Center for Neurobiological Engineering. She has co-founded two companies: Affectiva (now part of Smart Eye) providing emotion AI technologies now used by more than 25% of the Global Fortune 500, and Empatica, providing wearable sensors and analytics to improve health. Starting from inventions by Picard and her team, Empatica created the first AI-based smart watch cleared by FDA (in Neurology for monitoring seizures), which is now helping alert to bring potentially life-saving help for people with epilepsy.
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 MIT. Prior to joining the MIT Media Lab faculty in 1991, she was a member of the technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories, where she designed VLSI chips optimized for signal processing and developed new image compression techniques.
Picard's early research at MIT created new mathematical models that helped achieve the first content-based retrieval of digital images; her work also pioneered methods of automated search and annotation in digital video, including the creation of the Photobook system. As she studied human mechanisms of perception, she became convinced of the importance of emotion for making artificial intelligence (AI) that would be both smarter and better at interacting with people; she subsequently wrote the book Affective Computing, which became instrumental in starting a new field by that name. Today that field has its own journal, international conference, and professional society. Picard also served as a founding member of the IEEE Technical Committee on Wearable Information Systems in 1998, helping launch the field of wearable computing.
Picard is an active inventor with patents including wearable and non-contact sensors, algorithms, and systems for sensing, recognizing, and responding respectfully to human affective information. Her inventions have applications in autism, epilepsy, depression, PTSD, sleep, stress, dementia, autonomic nervous system disorders, human and machine learning, health behavior change, market research, customer service, and human-computer interaction, and are in use by thousands of research teams worldwide as well as in many products and services.
For more from Roz, see her essay in Christianity Today published a couple of years ago.
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The Carver Cast engages with Christian faculty in higher education and highlights the work of those faculty to bridge connections between university, church, and society. In doing so, it seeks to disrupt the perceptions that Christians are “anti-intellectual” and that higher education is “anti-Christian.” Tune in for a wide-ranging discussion with faculty around the country, with mediocre production quality but excellent content!
Penina Laker and John Inazu are Carver Project faculty fellows and members of the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis, where Laker is assistant professor of communication design and Inazu is a professor of law and religion.