Overview

Gender

female

Professor Rosalind W. Picard, Sc.D. is founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab, co-director of the Media Lab's Advancing Wellbeing Initiative, and faculty chair of MIT's Mind Hand Heart Initiative. She has co-founded Empatica, Inc. creating wearable sensors and analytics to improve health, and Affectiva, Inc. delivering technology to help measure and communicate emotion. Picard holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering with highest honors from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and master's and doctorate degrees, both in electrical engineering and computer science, from MIT. She is a top-cited computer scientist, best known for authoring the book Affective Computing, which became instrumental in starting a new field by that name. Picard also served as a founding member of the IEEE Technical Committee on Wearable Information Systems in 1998, helping launch the field of wearable computing. Picard is an active inventor and her group's inventions have been twice named to "top ten" lists, including the New York Times Magazine's Best Ideas of 2006 for their Social Cue Reader, used in autism, and 2011's Popular Science Top Ten Inventions for a Mirror that Monitors Vital Signs. Her inventions have applications in autism, epilepsy, depression, PTSD, sleep, stress, dementia, autonomic nervous system disorders, human and machine learning, health behavior change, market research, customer service, and human-robot interaction.