Academics
Picard holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and a certificate in computer engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology (1984), and master's (1986) and doctorate degrees (1991), both in electrical engineering and computer science, from MIT. Her thesis was titled Texture Modeling: Temperature Effects on Markov/Gibbs Random Fields. She has been a member of the faculty at the MIT Media Laboratory since 1991, with tenure since 1998 and a full professorship since 2005.
Picard is a researcher in the field of affective computing and the founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the MIT Media Lab. The Affective Computing Research Group develops tools, techniques, and devices for sensing, interpreting, and processing emotion signals that drive state-of-the-art systems which respond intelligently to human emotional states. The key aspect that Picard focuses on in her research is not in the difference between "excited" and "calm" emotions, but in the difference between "excited-happy" and "excited-angry-or-upset", which are complicated for a computer to determine. Applications of their research include improved tutoring systems and assistive technology for use in addressing the verbal communications difficulties experienced by individuals with autism.
She also works with Sherry Turkle and Cynthia Breazeal in the fields of social robots, digital image processing, pattern recognition, and wearable computers. Picard's former students includes Steve Mann, professor and researcher in wearable computers.
Read more about this topic: Rosalind Picard
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