Sea Crest Convention Center, North Falmouth, MA, November 2-4, 2001
by Lola Cañamero, symposium chair
Three years after the first "tangled knot" meeting in the 1998 AAAI Fall Symposium in Orlando, this symposium gathered researchers from different disciplines and backgrounds to exchange ideas about the roles of emotions in grounding inter-personal behaviors and social cognition, and to reflect on the motivations, scientific grounds, and practical consequences of our efforts to build artifacts endowed with emotional capabilities. Emotions seem to be at the very heart of what being social means. This idea, however, leads somehow to a Gordian knot: are we social because we have emotions, or do we have emotions because we are a highly social species? Should we rather talk of "co-evolution" of emotions and sociality? Does this strong link between emotions, cognition, and sociality also apply to non-human, non-biological species, i.e. artifacts? These were some of the background questions underlying the different artifacts, models and theories presented at the symposium.
Presentations were organized around five main themes: emotion, social behavior, and learning; perceiving others' emotions, perceiving others through emotions; emotions in decision making; creating and regulating affect with/through artifacts; and emotions in social behavior and adaptation.
Five keynote speakers addressed fundamental topics in various aspects of emotion research. The psychology of emotion was represented by Andrew Ortony, who introduced "Some Thoughts about the Behavioral Concomitants of Emotions", and by Craig A. Smith, who presented his work with Leslie Kirby "On the Elicitation, Differentiation, and Organization of Emotion: Structural and Procedural Considerations"; Rosalind Picard addressed the challenging problem of "Machine Recognition of Human Emotions"; John McCarthy expressed his concerns about emotional artifacts and told us why "Robots Can Be Made with Human-like Emotions but Shouldn't Be"; and Marvin Minsky presented some of the ground-breaking ideas about emotions he has been elaborating over the last years in his (forthcoming) book "The Emotion Machine: A Model of Everyday Mental Activity."
A panel discussion with the participation of Paul Dumouchel, John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Rosalind Picard, and Craig Smith was held the afternoon of the second day to reflect about different aspects of "The impact of affective artifacts on our social world."
The symposium concluded with an open discussion where some big challenges and directions for future research in this area were identified. General consensus was reached about the benefits (or rather the need) of multidisciplinary efforts involving human, animal, and artificial emotion researchers. The role of artificial intelligence and robotics in these efforts was also the object of agreement in that, far from a mere implementation of psychological or biological theories about emotion, artificial models of emotions can provide unprecedented challenges and novel theoretical insights, and have us think in different ways about issues relevant to emotions and their roles in social interaction and cognition. Looking towards the future, the spread of affective artifacts in our everyday life will also force us to rethink some of the ways in which we relate socially and emotionally with humans and machines.
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