IEEE Future Directions
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Sentiment analyses, mood detection, empathic engagement are on the horizon of autonomous systems requirements list. Technologies are based on artificial intelligence algorithms and can focus on a single person as well as on a group of people (as large as a community or a citizenship in a town).
There are several APIs available to detect mood. Technology evolution is driven by a growing demand for emotion detection stemming by the business needs to better understand clients and evaluate the most effective ways of interaction. The market is expected to grow from the 2,.77B$ of 2015 to the 6.19B$ in 2020. based on face image, on videos, speech and text (with these latter involving semantic analyses).
In the future a sort of sentiment analyses will be required to infer the “character” of an autonomous system once a need for interaction arises. This will be used to fine tune an interaction framework, from need to cooperate to willingness to cooperate to saprophytic cooperation.
More in the future symbiotic autonomous systems operating in health care will be facing situation awareness issues. Embedded medical devices will benefit from interaction among them to get an overall situation awareness.
Phatic technologies
Technologies supporting situation awareness will also have an impact in the area of phatic technologies, the technologies used by humans to set up, maintain and reinforce a relationship (among humans); clearly they involve communications. As boundaries of interactions among humans and machines are getting blurred phatic technologies will be applied to the symbiotic relations across humans and machines.
Internet has been the source of a strong evolution, with social networks, social media and social communications that have expanded the possibility of setting up, reinforcing and maintain group relationships.
We are already starting to see groups “moderated” by machine (initially for “policing” purposes) and we have virtual machines that play the role of a journalist sorting content and creating ad hoc publications fitting a specific group of interest. They are now evolving with the possibility of managing interaction, responding to questions, setting up discussion areas and so on.
Although for many years a need for socialization among autonomous systems is unlikely it is not unreasonable to think that phatic technology will be needed to support symbiotic autonomous systems relations, wherever humans are involved.
