China Leads Rapid Growth of Affective Computing Research
• Affective computing integrates computer science, psychology, and neuroscience to enable machines to perceive, recognize, understand, and respond to human emotions.
• Research in affective computing has grown rapidly since 2010 due to advances in deep learning, with applications across sectors like healthcare, education, and business services.
• China leads the world in affective computing research output, followed by the US, India, the UK and Germany. High impact journals like IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing publish much of this research.
• Current trends include collecting multimodal emotional data, refining multimodal fusion technology, integrating expert knowledge, and addressing ethical concerns around emotional data.
• Future applications with high potential include affective brain-computer interfaces, empathetic human-computer dialogue, emotion-assisted decision making, and affective virtual reality.