| Biography
Rosalind W. Picard is founder and director of the Affective Computing group at the MIT Media Laboratory and is co-director of the Things That Think consortium, the largest industrial sponsorship organization at the Media Lab. She 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. She has been a member of the faculty at the MIT Media Laboratory since 1991, with tenure since 1998. Prior to completing her doctorate at MIT, she was a member of the technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories where she designed VLSI chips for digital signal processing, and developed new methods of image compression and analysis.
The author of over 140 peer-reviewed scientific articles in multidimensional signal modeling, computer vision, pattern recognition, machine learning, and human-computer interaction, Picard is known internationally for envisioning and conducting research in affective computing—computing that relates to, arises from, or deliberately influences emotion or other affective phenomena—and, prior to that, for pioneering research in content-based image and video retrieval. She is recipient (with Tom Minka) of a best paper prize for work on machine learning with multiple models (1998) and is recipient (with Barry Kort and Rob Reilly) of a "best theory paper" prize for their work on affect in human learning (2001). Her award-winning book, Affective Computing, (MIT Press, 1997) lays the groundwork for giving machines the skills of emotional intelligence. She and her students have designed and developed a variety of new sensors, algorithms, and systems for sensing, recognizing, and responding respectfully to human affective information, with applications in human and machine learning, health, and human-computer interaction. She is an IEEE Fellow.
Picard has served on many science and engineering program committees, editorial boards, and review panels, and is presently serving on the editorial board of User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction: The Journal of Personalization Research, as well as on the advisory boards for the National Science Foundation's division of Computers in Science and Engineering (CISE) and for the Georgia Tech College of Computing.
Picard works closely with industry, and has consulted with companies such as Apple, AT&T, BT, HP, iRobot, and Motorola. She has delivered keynote presentations or invited plenary talks at over fifty science or technology events, and distinguished lectures and colloquia at dozens of universities and research labs internationally. Her group's work has been featured in national and international forums for the general public, such as The New York Times, The London Independent, Scientific American Frontiers, NPR's Tech Nation and The Connection, ABC's Nightline and World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, Time, Vogue, Voice of America Radio, New Scientist, and the BBC's The Works and The Big Byte.
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