Abstract: Emotions are powerful, mediate humans’ experiences with their surroundings, and impact decision-making and attention online and off. Sharing and signaling one’s emotions to other humans can be beneficial, but involves privacy calculations and complex decision-making processes. Despite the deeply personal nature of human emotion, artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms are being built to recognize and infer emotions using data sources such as social media behavior, streaming service use, voice, facial expressions, biometrics, and body language in ways often unknown to users. A key perspective missing from debates in emotion AI/recognition is that of the humans who produce the data that make emotion recognition possible, and whose experiences are shaped by these technologies. In this talk I will share insights from my recent work around data subjects’ attitudes toward and conceptions of emotion recognition technologies, factors informing these attitudes, as well as anticipated risks and benefits. I focus on social media as a technological context and discuss data subjects’ attitudes towards emotion recognition on social media broadly, as well as emotion AI’s use in wellbeing and advertising domains. I then complicate accuracy and transparency notions in emotion recognition through an analysis of data subjects’ attitudes towards these notions and related folk theories. I conclude with a discussion of my research group’s ongoing and future research in this space.

Bio: Dr. Nazanin Andalibi is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan School of Information. She is also affiliated with the Center for Social Media Responsibility, the Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing, and the Digital Studies Institute. Her research interests are in social computing, computer-mediated communication, and human-computer interaction, including examining relationships between emotions, identity, and technologies in contexts ranging from social media to artificial intelligence. Through this research agenda, Dr. Andalibi seeks to inform theory, design, activism, and policy for socio-technical futures that foreground the values and needs of marginalized individuals to support qualities such as wellbeing, safety, privacy, ethics, and equity. Dr. Andalibi’s work is published in venues such as ACM CHI, CSCW, TOCHI, JMIR, and New Media and Society, and featured by media outlets such as CNN, Fast Company, and Huffington Post. Her publications have received several Best Paper Honorable Mention Awards at ACM CHI and CSCW and her work is sponsored by the National Science Foundation.