Shaundra Daily: Getting Emotion

(air swooshing) (gentle music) - So many of my projects have involved emotion because for a long time, I didn't really get emotion.

My mother describes my temperament as just flat line.

She would have a surprise birthday party for me, and I would go, "Thanks mom."

And she said, it always hurt her feelings because she thought that I wasn't excited, but it's just that I just, I didn't emote.

As far as products that I've developed, the thing that I kept coming across was how our emotions can either impede or enhance learning.

So I was like, wow, I have this great dream of developing these awesome technology-infused environments for kids, but if they have stuff going on on the inside that impact what's happening in the classroom, it's really not gonna matter.

So I was like, man, well, what can I do?

How can I help kids using technologies that can sense emotion in different ways to appropriately sense and respond to their own emotions?

So the G.I.R.L.S.

software, it stood for girls involved in real-life sharing.

And the idea was the girls would go in.

They would think of a story.

They would make a scene.

They would have text associated, kind of like a comic book.

And then the tool that I built would look at their text and try to figure out what emotion was being expressed in the text and say, wow, that must have made you feel happy, to which they'd be like, wow, it's a computer.

How'd the computer know?

That's pretty cool.

I was trying to get girls to reflect on their emotions with the hopes that being able to reflect on emotions in this way would help them to deal with them in other situations.

The thought that I could build something that could help someone understand themselves better, for me, that's just what it's all about.

That's why I do what I do.

(gentle music continues)