Making technologies more emotionally intelligent is gaining increasing attention in academia and industry these days. It aims to equip computing devices and services with the abilities to perceive and understand users' emotions, as well as to manage and use these affects to improve user interactions and experiences. In this talk, I give an overview of our research efforts on designing emotional intelligence for machines. In particular, we take a data-driven approach to inferring and analyzing human emotions from their content production, consumption, and interpersonal interaction in socio-digital media. Then, we design multimodal experience-oriented displays to help users reflect on their emotion wellbeings. Last but not least, we experiment with the use of emotion ingredients to enrich user experiences with robots and virtual agents, persuasive technologies, and creativity authoring tools.

Xiaojuan Ma is an assistant professor of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). She received the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science at Princeton University. She was a post-doctoral researcher at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), and before that a research fellow in the National University of Singapore (NUS) in the Information Systems department. Before joining HKUST, she was a researcher of Human-Computer Interaction at Noah's Ark Lab, Huawei Tech. Investment Co., Ltd. in Hong Kong. Her background is in Human-Computer Interaction. She is particularly interested in multimodal affective computing in the domain of ubiquitous, social, and crowd computing and Human-Robot Interaction.