An Introduction to Emotionally Rich Man-machine Intelligent Systems

In this paper we present issues regarding the development of an artificial system that will register its user’s emotional state and act accordingly. We discuss these issues in the context of the ERMIS project. ERMIS stands for Emotion-Rich Man-machine Interaction Systems. ERMIS is a useful context because the project sets out to explore what we regard as the natural approach to developing an emotion-sensitive system. The nature of the consortium allows it to draw on expertise from a substantial range of backgrounds, academic and applied. That breadth is critical, because one of the key issues in handling emotion is that no one discipline covers all the relevant ground. As a result, there is a very real risk that experts in one of the relevant disciplines will make fatal assumptions about other aspects of the problem without recognising that there is an issue.