Alan Cowen
Special guest
Dr. Alan Cowen is an applied mathematician and computational emotion scientist who has developed new data-driven methods to study human experience and expression.
He was previously a researcher at the University of California and visiting scientist at Google, where he helped establish affective computing research efforts. In his paper published in Nature in 2021, Cowen was the first to
analyze facial expressions at a sufficient scale and level of precision to draw inferences from their occurrence in everyday life across cultures, analyzing six million natural videos from around the world. In PNAS, Science Advances, and Nature Human Behavior, he has characterized cues of emotion in the face, voice, and music across cultures and even in ancient sculptures. Cowen’s work has given rise to a mathematically-based theory of emotion, semantic space theory, which conceives of emotions as dimensions of a complex, multidimensional space.
Alan Cowen has been a guest on 1 episode.
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417: Hume AI with Alan Cowen
April 7th, 2022 | Season 11 | 40 mins 22 secs
Dr. Alan Cowen is the Executive Director of The Hume Initiative, a non-profit dedicated to the responsible advancement of AI with empathy, and CEO of Hume AI, an AI research lab and empathetic AI company that is hoping to pave the way for AI that improves our emotional well-being.
Chad talks with Alan about forming clear ethical guidelines around how this technology should be used because there is a problem in that the public is skeptical about whether technology is used for good or bad. The Hume Initiative is intended to lay out what concrete use cases will be and what use cases shouldn't be supported. Hume AI is built for developers to construct empathic abilities into their applications.