Interface[s] Montréal

Artificial Intelligence

Claude Frasson

Virtuel Age International, Université de Montréal, DIRO, Heron laboratory

Emotional Intelligence : trends and evolutions

View the presentation [In French]

Emotional Intelligence intervenes in all human interactions with the environment, at work, in the society, at home or at school. It plays an important role not only for the control of emotions and consequently of actions and reactions of an individual to the environment but also for acquisition of knowledge and more generally for training.

Initially considered as a sequence of emotional states which depend on psychological and social factors, the first approach concerned the identification of different types of emotions felt by an individual. Then, emotional intelligence aimed to control emotions in order to provide a better social behaviour, optimized performance at work, and to be able to control strong emotions. We can distinguish positive and negative emotions. Other works tried to understand the origin and mechanism of emotions, a complex domain which takes into account physiological factors.

In recent works we are focussing on emotions detections and control in knowledge acquisition. How emotions can contribute to improve memorizing or performances. How emotion management can improve quality of training. We will examine all these questions.

Claude Frasson is Professor in Computer Sciences at University of Montreal and director of GRITI (Inter University Research Group in Tutoring Systems, involving seven universities in Quebec). Owning a Doctorat d’Etat in Computer Sciences he is also an expert with the World Bank and United Nations. He has leaded more than 10 Millions dollars research projects within the last 10 years.

President of Virtuel Age International, a Company specialized in knowledge management, Virtual Reality and e-Learning, he oriented his research activity to intelligent knowledge management and intelligent learning.

His recent research have focussed on emotional intelligence, an important component of the brain that contains unconsciously more than 80% of our knowledge. Gate to the cognitive process and knowledge storage, the center of our emotions play a fundamental role in our behaviour. The purpose of this conference is to show the important resources that this type of intelligence can constitute.