Building The Hal-Like Laptop That Will Know How You Feel

Rosalind Picard is a contagious bundle of excitement when she talks about "Mind Reader," a system developed by her team in the Affective Computing Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. "Mind Reader" uses input from a video camera to perform real-time analysis of facial expressions. Using color-coded graphics, it reports whether you seem "interested" or "agreeing" or if you're "confused" about what you've just heard.