Episode 221 - Emotion and AI with Alan Cowen
Today’s guest is Dr. Alan Cowen, CEO of hume.ai, to discuss fascinating new research on human emotional states, and how machine learning and AI techniques can be used to distinguish between them.
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About Alan Cowen
Dr. Alan Cowen is a preeminent emotion and data scientist, and a researcher at the University of California with a PhD in neuroscience. He’s the Executive Director of The Hume Initiative (THI), CEO of Hume AI, and formerly the architect of Google’s affective computing efforts.
Cowen has spent the past two decades studying how emotions like curiosity, awe, anger, and joy motivate us to act and think. Beginning in 2017, Cowen has gained international attention for a series of studies documenting how over 20 emotions are experienced and expressed across cultures, contrary to the prevailing theory that all cultures share only six basic emotions, which had been widely accepted across the global scientific community for over half a century. These findings are now featured in most major textbooks on emotion and social psychology.
Following these discoveries, Cowen developed machine learning methods to measure emotional expressions in everyday life, enabling another new frontier of science. His groundbreaking findings are being used to better understand how artificial intelligence engines can capture human expression with enough subtlety and complexity to assess things like symptoms of mental illness, how people empathize with one another, and what moves people to be inspired, among others. Most importantly, these findings are now being used to identify signs of individuals’ well-being, so AI can learn to recognize these cues to improve our daily lives.
His profound work has given rise to semantic space theory, a mathematically based theory of emotion that is becoming a new standard theory in emotion science, and forged meaningful partnerships with the founder of Google Empathy Lab, as well as the lead scientist for PIXAR's Inside Out and SOUL, and esteemed scholars focused on AI fairness, racial biases, equity, and safety such as Elizabeth Adams, and more.
At Hume AI, Cowen is leading a group of AI researchers and psychologists from companies including Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, and the world’s leading empathic AI labs to draw on his scientific innovations to build empathy into AI. In its first year, Hume has licensed its solutions to pilot customers including cutting-edge startups and some of the world’s biggest tech companies who are integrating empathy into emerging technology. In April, Hume AI will be launching a developer platform that will provide more widespread access to its solutions, including over 100 companies currently on the waitlist.
At THI, Cowen brought together world-leading experts in AI research, ethics, social science, and cyberlaw to develop the first concrete ethical guidelines for the use of empathic AI which are available at TheHumeInitiative.org. Hume AI requires all of its customers to abide by these guidelines.
Cowen's work has been published in leading journals such as Nature, PNAS, and Science Advances. Most recently, Cowen was profiled in the Washington Post and discussed in internationally acclaimed researcher Brené Brown’s recent book, Atlas of the Heart. His work has also been covered in National Geographic, Bloomberg, BBC, CNN, WIRED, Scientific American, The Wall Street Journal, and Fast Company. Cowen is also co-host of “The Feelings Lab” podcast on iTunes.
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