Computers Responding to Student's Emotions & Boredom

                     Now a days the Scientists have started give life to the gadgets that we us. The Watson,Siri in iphone are the best examples. Recently scientists in the US have developed a computer which can respond to student's emotions.

               The project was as a result of a collaboration between computer scientists at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) and the Universidad de Granada. They created the system to recognise negative emotions such as anger, boredom and doubt. To "read" these, the computer system studied the tone of voice of the person talking to it, the speed of their speech, the energy of the voice signal and the duration of pauses, among a total of 60 "acoustic parameters". 

               AutoTutor is an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) that helps students learn complex technical content in Newtonian physics, computer literacy, and critical thinking by holding a conversation in natural language, simulating teaching and motivational strategies of human tutors, modeling students' cognitive states, using its student model to dynamically tailor the interaction to individual students, answering students' questions, identifying and correcting misconceptions, and keeping students engaged with images, animations, and simulations. In addition to these capabilities, Affective AutoTutor adds emotion-sensitive capabilities by monitoring facial features, body language, and conversational cues, regulating negative states such as frustration and boredom, and synthesizing emotions via the content of its verbal responses, speech intonation, and facial expressions of an animated teacher. 


                 The scientists say, the technology is that it matches the interaction of human tutors, not only offers tremendous learning possibilities for students, but also redefines human-computer interaction. These programs are know as "AutoTutor" and "Affective AutoTutor". The programme can gauge the student's level of knowledge by asking probing questions, analysing the student's responses to those questions, proactively correcting misconceptions, responding to the student's own questions. The programme can even sense a student's frustration or boredom via facial expression and body posture and dynamically changing its strategies to help the student conquer those negative emotions.