Rana el Kaliouby: This app knows how you feel — from the look on your face

137,905 views ・ 2015-06-15

TED


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Our emotions influence every aspect of our lives,
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from our health and how we learn, to how we do business and make decisions,
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big ones and small.
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Our emotions also influence how we connect with one another.
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We've evolved to live in a world like this,
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but instead, we're living more and more of our lives like this --
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this is the text message from my daughter last night --
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in a world that's devoid of emotion.
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So I'm on a mission to change that.
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I want to bring emotions back into our digital experiences.
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I started on this path 15 years ago.
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I was a computer scientist in Egypt,
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and I had just gotten accepted to a Ph.D. program at Cambridge University.
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So I did something quite unusual
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for a young newlywed Muslim Egyptian wife:
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With the support of my husband, who had to stay in Egypt,
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I packed my bags and I moved to England.
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At Cambridge, thousands of miles away from home,
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I realized I was spending more hours with my laptop
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than I did with any other human.
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Yet despite this intimacy, my laptop had absolutely no idea how I was feeling.
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It had no idea if I was happy,
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having a bad day, or stressed, confused,
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and so that got frustrating.
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Even worse, as I communicated online with my family back home,
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I felt that all my emotions disappeared in cyberspace.
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I was homesick, I was lonely, and on some days I was actually crying,
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but all I had to communicate these emotions was this.
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(Laughter)
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Today's technology has lots of I.Q., but no E.Q.;
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lots of cognitive intelligence, but no emotional intelligence.
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So that got me thinking,
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what if our technology could sense our emotions?
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What if our devices could sense how we felt and reacted accordingly,
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just the way an emotionally intelligent friend would?
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Those questions led me and my team
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to create technologies that can read and respond to our emotions,
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and our starting point was the human face.
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So our human face happens to be one of the most powerful channels
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that we all use to communicate social and emotional states,
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everything from enjoyment, surprise,
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empathy and curiosity.
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In emotion science, we call each facial muscle movement an action unit.
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So for example, action unit 12,
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it's not a Hollywood blockbuster,
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it is actually a lip corner pull, which is the main component of a smile.
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Try it everybody. Let's get some smiles going on.
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Another example is action unit 4. It's the brow furrow.
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It's when you draw your eyebrows together
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and you create all these textures and wrinkles.
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We don't like them, but it's a strong indicator of a negative emotion.
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So we have about 45 of these action units,
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and they combine to express hundreds of emotions.
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Teaching a computer to read these facial emotions is hard,
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because these action units, they can be fast, they're subtle,
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and they combine in many different ways.
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So take, for example, the smile and the smirk.
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They look somewhat similar, but they mean very different things.
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(Laughter)
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So the smile is positive,
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a smirk is often negative.
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Sometimes a smirk can make you become famous.
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But seriously, it's important for a computer to be able
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to tell the difference between the two expressions.
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So how do we do that?
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We give our algorithms
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tens of thousands of examples of people we know to be smiling,
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from different ethnicities, ages, genders,
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and we do the same for smirks.
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And then, using deep learning,
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the algorithm looks for all these textures and wrinkles
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and shape changes on our face,
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and basically learns that all smiles have common characteristics,
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all smirks have subtly different characteristics.
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And the next time it sees a new face,
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it essentially learns that
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this face has the same characteristics of a smile,
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and it says, "Aha, I recognize this. This is a smile expression."
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So the best way to demonstrate how this technology works
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is to try a live demo,
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so I need a volunteer, preferably somebody with a face.
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(Laughter)
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Cloe's going to be our volunteer today.
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So over the past five years, we've moved from being a research project at MIT
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to a company,
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where my team has worked really hard to make this technology work,
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as we like to say, in the wild.
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And we've also shrunk it so that the core emotion engine
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works on any mobile device with a camera, like this iPad.
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So let's give this a try.
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As you can see, the algorithm has essentially found Cloe's face,
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so it's this white bounding box,
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and it's tracking the main feature points on her face,
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so her eyebrows, her eyes, her mouth and her nose.
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The question is, can it recognize her expression?
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So we're going to test the machine.
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So first of all, give me your poker face. Yep, awesome. (Laughter)
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And then as she smiles, this is a genuine smile, it's great.
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So you can see the green bar go up as she smiles.
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Now that was a big smile.
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Can you try a subtle smile to see if the computer can recognize?
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It does recognize subtle smiles as well.
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We've worked really hard to make that happen.
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And then eyebrow raised, indicator of surprise.
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Brow furrow, which is an indicator of confusion.
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Frown. Yes, perfect.
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So these are all the different action units. There's many more of them.
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This is just a slimmed-down demo.
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But we call each reading an emotion data point,
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and then they can fire together to portray different emotions.
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So on the right side of the demo -- look like you're happy.
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So that's joy. Joy fires up.
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And then give me a disgust face.
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Try to remember what it was like when Zayn left One Direction.
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(Laughter)
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Yeah, wrinkle your nose. Awesome.
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And the valence is actually quite negative, so you must have been a big fan.
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So valence is how positive or negative an experience is,
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and engagement is how expressive she is as well.
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So imagine if Cloe had access to this real-time emotion stream,
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and she could share it with anybody she wanted to.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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So, so far, we have amassed 12 billion of these emotion data points.
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It's the largest emotion database in the world.
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We've collected it from 2.9 million face videos,
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people who have agreed to share their emotions with us,
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and from 75 countries around the world.
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It's growing every day.
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It blows my mind away
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that we can now quantify something as personal as our emotions,
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and we can do it at this scale.
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So what have we learned to date?
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Gender.
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Our data confirms something that you might suspect.
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Women are more expressive than men.
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Not only do they smile more, their smiles last longer,
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and we can now really quantify what it is that men and women
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respond to differently.
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Let's do culture: So in the United States,
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women are 40 percent more expressive than men,
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but curiously, we don't see any difference in the U.K. between men and women.
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(Laughter)
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Age: People who are 50 years and older
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are 25 percent more emotive than younger people.
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Women in their 20s smile a lot more than men the same age,
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perhaps a necessity for dating.
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But perhaps what surprised us the most about this data
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is that we happen to be expressive all the time,
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even when we are sitting in front of our devices alone,
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and it's not just when we're watching cat videos on Facebook.
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We are expressive when we're emailing, texting, shopping online,
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or even doing our taxes.
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Where is this data used today?
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In understanding how we engage with media,
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so understanding virality and voting behavior;
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and also empowering or emotion-enabling technology,
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and I want to share some examples that are especially close to my heart.
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Emotion-enabled wearable glasses can help individuals
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who are visually impaired read the faces of others,
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and it can help individuals on the autism spectrum interpret emotion,
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something that they really struggle with.
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In education, imagine if your learning apps
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sense that you're confused and slow down,
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or that you're bored, so it's sped up,
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just like a great teacher would in a classroom.
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What if your wristwatch tracked your mood,
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or your car sensed that you're tired,
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or perhaps your fridge knows that you're stressed,
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so it auto-locks to prevent you from binge eating. (Laughter)
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I would like that, yeah.
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What if, when I was in Cambridge,
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I had access to my real-time emotion stream,
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and I could share that with my family back home in a very natural way,
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just like I would've if we were all in the same room together?
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I think five years down the line,
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all our devices are going to have an emotion chip,
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and we won't remember what it was like when we couldn't just frown at our device
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and our device would say, "Hmm, you didn't like that, did you?"
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Our biggest challenge is that there are so many applications of this technology,
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my team and I realize that we can't build them all ourselves,
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so we've made this technology available so that other developers
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can get building and get creative.
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We recognize that there are potential risks
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and potential for abuse,
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but personally, having spent many years doing this,
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I believe that the benefits to humanity
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from having emotionally intelligent technology
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far outweigh the potential for misuse.
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And I invite you all to be part of the conversation.
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The more people who know about this technology,
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the more we can all have a voice in how it's being used.
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So as more and more of our lives become digital,
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we are fighting a losing battle trying to curb our usage of devices
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in order to reclaim our emotions.
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So what I'm trying to do instead is to bring emotions into our technology
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and make our technologies more responsive.
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So I want those devices that have separated us
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to bring us back together.
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And by humanizing technology, we have this golden opportunity
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to reimagine how we connect with machines,
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and therefore, how we, as human beings,
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connect with one another.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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