CONCEPT
Affective Computing
The field premised on the claim that machines can read, interpret, and simulate human emotion—built on Paul Ekman’s universality thesis, deployed in airports, classrooms, and hiring interviews, and operating, by the judgment of a substantial body of evidence, on foundations it cannot afford to examine too closely.
Affective computing is the research program and commercial industry premised on a single foundational claim: that emotion is written legibly on the human face in a universal script, and that script can be learned by a machine. The term was coined by MIT researcher Rosalind Picard in a 1995 paper and her 1997 book of the same name, but the intellectual foundation was laid by
Paul Ekman, whose decades of cross-cultural research on basic emotions and the
Facial Action Coding System gave the field its taxonomy, its measurement instrument, and its scientific legitimacy. The architecture of every commercial emotion-recognition system traces back to Ekman: a camera captures a face, a computer-vision model detects
facial action units or learns expression features directly from pixels, and a classifier maps those features onto one of Ekman's six or seven basic emotion categories. The system is, in effect, an attempt to reproduce