Who’s in the mood for emotional intelligence?

THE UK’s first degree course dedicated to developing skills to create emotionally intelligent devices which can respond to how happy, sad or angry someone is - is being offered by a Welsh university.

Hands-on experience of working with experimental, interactive systems will be part of the new MSc in affective computing at Wrexham Glyndwr University.

Demand for professionals with the required specialist skills in this emerging field is expected to surge over the next 10 years, the university said.

Development of technology such as facial, voice and gesture recognition is providing new opportunities to create computers which adapt their behaviour depending on the user’s mood.

“The programme develops skills and expertise in the fields of artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, and big data analysis and the opportunity to produce emotionally intelligent and aware technologies has a huge amount of commercial and life-changing purposes,” a university spokesman said.

Smart devices that will select a song from a streaming music service according to whether the listener is happy, sad, energetic or feeling lazy, for example, could be close to reality, says the course leader and Reader in Computing, Dr Stuart Cunningham.