Dissertation Defense WHAT: Carson Reynolds: "Adversarial Uses of Affective Computing and Ethical Implications" WHEN: Wednesday, August 17, 2005, 10:00 AM EST WHERE: Bartos Theatre, MIT Media Lab (E15) DISSERTATION COMMITTEE: Rosalind W. Picard Professor of Media Arts and Sciences Massachusetts Institute of Technology Chris Csikszentmihályi Muriel R. Cooper Career Development Professor of Media Arts and Sciences Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Sciences Massachusetts Institute of Technology Caspar Hare Assistant Professor of Philosophy Massachusetts Institute of Technology ABSTRACT: Much existing affective computing research focuses on systems designed to use information related to emotion to benefit users. This thesis discusses several adversarial uses of affective computing: systems where the designer's goal is to hinder some users. The approach taken is twofold: first, experimental observation of use of systems that collect affective signals and transmit them to an adversary; second, formation of normative ethical judgments regarding adversarial uses of these same systems. Reynolds proposes to examine three adversarial contexts: the cheat experiment, the mole experiment, and the unfair experiment. In the cheat experiment, participants perform a laborious task that allows increasing monetary reward by deceiving the experimenter. The mole experiment centers on a job interview where some participants hide information, interviewers are rewarded for hiring the honest participant, and where interviewees are rewarded for being hired. In the unfair experiment, subjects are asked to play a simple poker-like game against an adversary who has extra affective or game-state information. In all three experiments, it is hypothesized that participants using systems that sense and transmit affective information to an adversary will have degraded performance and significantly different ethical evaluations than those using comparable systems that do not sense or transmit affective information. The contribution of these experiments is a set of design recommendations for affective computing systems to be used in adversarial situations. MIT Media Laboratory Home Page | Events Main Index