Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[<thomas AT tbeckett.com>]

> Computers are learning to recognize facial
> expressions as emotions. Opens up new
>
avenues in UI design. Now, in addition to
> knowing where the mouse pointer is and what
>
your user typed last, you can know how
> they *feel.*

As an early, easy task, they can
train the software to recognize when someone flips the bird.  "Recognize
THIS you stinkin'lump of silicon!"  Crotch-grabbing is only a step beyond 
that.  "I got yer
server error RIGHTHERE!"

I could actually get to like such a feature.  A computer that understands
whenyou're heaping abuse on it.

TaB



>
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/la-000032322may07.story
>
> You can
program empathy in to
> your applications. Your Sales Forecasting
> program can tell the
manager is having a bad
> day and pad the results a bit to soften the blow.
>
> Or, your
install program can tell the user is
> frustrated, determine that there is no way the
>
user is going to be able to tolerate all of the bugs
> in the actual application, and just
refuse to continue.
> This will save the users from a lot of pain.
>
> Perhaps an emotion-
enabled list serv can aggregate
> the emotional responses of those reading the list's
email,
> map the aggregate to audio and stream a continuous
> community wail from a web
server.
>
> Is this good??
>
> Should everything be digitized?
>
> Don't get me
wrong, human emotions have
> their place. They are quite nice in a lot of
> ways. But I'm
dubious about them
> in the context of a UI language.
>
> Seems to me that computers do
best with
> simple languages that have a small set of inputs.
> 1's and 0's, HTTP, curly
brackets and terse
> code.
>
> OTOH, the language of human emotion is highly
>
semantic with many tokens.
>
> All this talk of "reading people's faces" sounds
> a lot
like Ada to me, the DOD language known
> for having *way* too many keywords.
>
> Is
exciting on some levels. I can't wait to
> see the first viruses written in this
technology.
> How about a program that senses that the user
> is getting mad, learns what
makes the user mad,
> and keeps making the user madder until the user
> completely looses
it?
>
> Cheers :-)
>
>
>
>
>
> ---
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