Rosalind Picard

Her work has influenced many fields beyond computer science, ranging from video games to law. One critic, Aaron Sloman, described the book as having a "bold vision" that will inspire some and irritate others. Other critics emphasize the importance behind the work as it establishes an important framework for the field as a whole. Picard responded to Sloman's review by saying, "I don’t think the review captures the flavor of the book. However, he does raise interesting points, as well as potential misunderstandings, both of which I am grateful for the opportunity to comment on".

In 2009, Picard co-founded Affectiva, along with Rana el Kaliouby, and became the company's chief scientist for the next four years. The company was based on technologies the two began developing at the Affective Computing Research Group within the MIT Media Lab. In April 2014, Picard co-founded Empatica, Inc, a business creating wearable sensors and analytics to help people understand and communicate physiological changes involved in emotion. Her team showed that physiological changes in the emotion system could help identify seizures that might be life-threatening.

Picard is credited with starting the branch of computer science known as affective computing with her 1997 book of the same name. This book described the importance of emotion in intelligence, the vital role human emotion communication has to relationships between people, and the possible effects of emotion recognition by robots and wearable computers. Her work in this field has led to an expansion into autism research and developing devices that could help humans recognize nuances in human emotions.

Picard holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering with highest honors 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.

Besides researching robotic intelligence, Picard has performed research in the field of autism. Her team created an "emotional-social intelligence prosthesis" (ESP), that allowed a person diagnosed with autism to monitor their own facial reactions in order to educate them on social cues in others. This device had a 65% accuracy rate for reading one of eight emotional states from an individual's facial expressions and head movements. She revealed parts of this technology at the 11th Annual International Symposium on Wearable Computers.

Rosalind Wright Picard (born May 17, 1962) is an American scholar and inventor who is Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the MIT Media Lab, and co-founder of the startups Affectiva and Empatica. In 2005, she was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers for contributions to image and video analysis and affective computing. In 2019 she received one of the highest professional honors accorded an engineer, election to the National Academy of Engineering for her contributions on affective computing and wearable computing.