BlogOG — parthakkar

Diving Deep Into Affective Computing With My Privacy Perspective

During my masters program at UMBC, while selecting courses, I always came across this course called Affective Computing. I was not quite aware of what the term affective computing meant, so I did some research. Found that affective computing is an interdisciplinary field spanning computer science, psychology, and cognitive science. I always found human psychology gripping but never had an opportunity to dive deep into this field. Discovering this interaction of psychology and HCI, I was very curious to understand the emotional perspective of human computer interaction. Now, I was also curious to know how computers can be trained to effectively interact with humans who possess distinct personalities. I was also curious to know the influencing factors like mode of interaction, age differences, cultural differences, social settings, and the different moods of a person throughout a day.

The affective computing course was very well structured. It consisted of 2-3 weekly readings, which included some significant pieces of literature in the field of affective commuting. This guided me through all the concepts that lie under the branch of affective computing right up until 1997 when the term affective computing was first used, up until now.

I decided to take up this course when I was in the third semester of my master’s degree. At that time, I had myself completely engrossed in the field of usable privacy by doing a significant amount of research. I figured that learning affective computing would have me questioning every aspect of this field of privacy. I tried looking for literature which intersected the field of affective computing and privacy, and I couldn't find anything significant. That’s what triggered me to start a blog for my privacy perspective on affective computing. This blog series is my journey of learning affective computing by analyzing scenarios and applications of this field for its novelty, shortcomings and the foreseeable future.