In the film “2001: A Space Odyssey” there is a famous scene where astronaut Dave Bowman asks the computer HAL to “open the pod bay doors” and HAL refuses to let him in, replying “I can’t do that Dave” and stating that the astronaut's plan to deactivate him jeopardizes the mission.
Perhaps the annoyance and stress in Dave’s voice didn’t fully register with HAL.
As the Internet becomes ubiquitous technology needs to deal increasingly with human factors, including emotions. The modeling of human emotions in computer processing can help to build more efficient systems, e.g., using emotional models for enforcing time-critical decisions. This involves specification, analysis and display of emotion-related states.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is working on formalizing emotional states in such a way that computers can process the information. The name of the specification, which has reached second-draft status, is Emotional Markup Language (abbreviated EmotionML ).EmotionML assigns a category to the emotion involved (anger, contempt, etc.) as well as an intensity of the emotion, represented as a numerical value. This would allow computers to respond to your expressions; a puzzled look would take you directly to customer service, for example.
The language is conceived as a "plug-in" language suitable for use in three different areas: (1) manual annotation of data; (2) automatic recognition of emotion-related states from user behavior; and (3) generation of emotion-related system behavior.
Sound interesting? There is a workshop called the W3C Workshop on Emotion Markup Language scheduled to take place October 5 and 6 at Institut Telecom Paristech, 37-39 rue Dareau 75014 Paris, France.
