Books by author: Rosalind Picard

Picard tackles a lot of difficult issues related to computers and emotions (both giving computers the ability to sense and react to human motion and the more controversial idea of "giving computers emotions"). To me, this book reads somewhat like a bloated doctoral proposal. There's a sense of: here's a topic, and here are some tools that might be useful for attacking it, but we haven't really done any of the work yet. So it works as a manifesto of sorts, but there aren't any real results in the book itself. Working in the same lab as Picard and her students (and knowing many of them personally), I have a fairly good idea of what they're up to now, and they seem to be making some progress toward the goals set out in this book. This area is something to be taken seriously.