Emotional AI: Teaching Computers Empathy with Pascale Fung

The podcast you're about to hear is one of a handful of interviews I recorded live from the O'Reilly AI and Strata conferences in New York City. My guest this time is Pascale Fung, professor of electrical & computer engineering at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Pascale's talk at the AI conference was titled "How to make robots empathetic to human feelings in real time." Pascale and I spent some time discussing the focus of her research and the topic of her presentation, which is teaching computers to understand and respond to human emotions. We also spend some time talking about the (information) theoretical foundations of modern approaches to speech understanding. As is the case with my other field recordings, there's a bit of unavoidable background noise. Sorry for that.