Creating Emotionally Intelligent Technology

How do we build AI systems that understand, respond to, and support human emotions? Professor Hatice Gunes, who leads the Affective Intelligence and Robotics Lab (AFAR) at the University of Cambridge's Department of Computer Science and Technology, has spent more than a decade working on exactly that question.

Her research spans multimodal, social, and affective intelligence for AI systems, with a particular focus on embodied agents, social robots, and wellbeing technologies. The lab cross-fertilizes machine learning, affective computing, social signal processing, and human nonverbal behaviour understanding to design systems that can perceive and respond to emotional cues. Recent projects include robotic mental wellbeing coaches deployed in workplaces, social robots for child mental health and wellbeing assessment, and work on fairness in affective and wellbeing computing—the latter earning the Best Paper Award in Responsible Affective Computing at IEEE ACII'23.

Her personal website is a useful entry point into this research area, with links to publications, software, the FABO database, and a recorded Friday Discourse at the Royal Institution titled "Creating Emotionally Intelligent Technology", which makes the work accessible to a broader audience interested in how AI can be designed with emotional sensitivity in mind.