News: Are you ready for angry robots?

By Guest Writer
ZDNet Australia
June 21, 2002, 10:20 AM PT
By Ed Dawson

Imagine a "friendly fridge" that could have its own personality, or a child's toy that would do more than imitate feelings.
An Australian company called Mindsystems has devised an Artificial Intelligence system for simulating human emotion. It can apparently be used to quite convincingly replicate a person's feelings in a variety of situations. Called EMIR (Emotional Model for Intelligent Response), it is based on real-time data collected by researchers in the psychological sciences
Mindsystems predicts EMIR could be used for virtually every system that has a human-machine interface. It goes as far as imagining a stock-market simulation that could predict how thousands of investors would react emotionally to certain information.
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The system includes simulation for feelings that are somewhat surprising. For example, the system can simulate boredom.
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