Jobs in Cognitive Psychology

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Jobs in Cognitive Psychology

• Nancy Alvarado, Ph.D.
• Assistant Professor

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What is Cognitive Psychology?

• The study of how people think.
• Information processing uses computer analogies
  to describe thinking.
• Cognitive science human and machine
  intelligence (includes neuroscience, linguistics,
  philosophy as well as psychology)
• Because mental activity cannot be directly
  observed, indirect measures are used.

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You Cant Escape It

• Clinical psychology uses cognitive approaches to
  identify and treat pathologies
• Disorders have cognitive symptoms
• Therapies address thinking in order to change
  behavior and emotion
• Developmental psychology includes cognitive
  development, language acquisition.
• Social cognition is the cutting edge of social
  psychology.

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My Research Interests

• Psychology
• Emotion, facial expressions, language used to
  describe emotional experiences, coping styles.
• Color naming, cross-cultural comparisons of color
  categorization (Vietnamese vs English).
• Cognitive Science/Computer Science
• Artificial intelligence, architectures of mind,
  the role of emotion in virtual agents and robots.
• Human-computer interaction.

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Play With Your Foodby Saxton Freymann Joost
Elffers
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My Work at IBM

• Joshua Blue a computer simulation of mind,
  guided by motivation and emotion.
• Everywhere displays that project computer
  images onto objects in the world.
• The Glass Engine -- for searching a music catalog
  based on subjective qualities of the pieces.

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More Applied Work at IBM

• Museum kiosks that teach people how to look at
  art by comparing artists styles.
• Computer generation and recognition of affect in
  a persons speech to make speech sound more
  natural.
• Peer-tutor (with Roz Picard at MIT) recognition
  of user frustration using a camera mounted on top
  of the computer.

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MIT Learning Companion
Pupil Detection Using the IBM BlueEyes
Camera Kapoor, Mota Picard (2001). Towards a
Learning Companion that Recognizes Affect, AAAI
Fall Symposium 2001, North Falmouth, MA
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Relational Agents

• Tim Bickmore has developed a virtual agent that
  acts as an exercise coach to encourage physical
  training. Here he is shown talking with Rea, a
  virtual real estate agent.

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Sensing Driver Affect
Detecting Driver Stress MIT Media Lab Healey
Picard (2000). Smart Car Detecting Driver
Stress. Proceedings of the 15th International
Conference on Pattern Recognition, Barcelona,
Spain.
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Kismet
Cynthia Breazeal (MIT) and her sociable robot
affect motivates and guides social learning.
Breazeal, C. (2002). Designing Sociable Machines,
MIT Press
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CMUs OZ Project (Bates/Reilly)
Otto Iris are animated characters that express
their own feelings in interactive games
Zoesis Studios, http//www.ottoandiris.com/
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Robot Improv
Two robots perform a short play based on an
elementary acting exerciseThe actors decide on
their next action and line of dialog based on
their current goals and emotional state and the
other actor's last actions. There is no
pre-determined script, only sets of available
actions and dialog for the actors to choose from.
Each play is improvised at run-time.
Bruce, Knight Nourbakhsh. Robot Improv Using
Drama to Create Believable Agents. The Robotics
Institute, Carnegie Mellon University
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Navigating Environments
Rodrigo Ventura and colleagues have created
soccer-playing robots that learn to respond to
environmental cues
Sadio, Tavares, Ventura Custodio (2001). An
emotion-based agent architecture application with
real robots. AAAI Fall Symposium, N. Falmouth, MA.
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Other Projects

• Social interactions in chat rooms
• Placement of a dot representing each participant
  in a discussion shows who is central.
• Privacy and trust on the web
• What encourages people to use the internet to
  make purchases, how safe do they perceive it?
• Biometrics how can computers be used to
  identify people in crowds or entry points, for
  security purposes?

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Training Needed

• M.S. in Experimental or Engineering Psychology.
• Accessibility and usability studies
• Market research
• Ph.D. in Cognitive, Social or Experimental
  Psychology.
• Research on human-computer interaction
• Design of products

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Careers in Industry

• IBM Research hires a lot of Ph.D.-level
  psychologists in its think tank (so do Xerox,
  Microsoft, Oracle, Disney, etc.)
• Masters-level psychology jobs are abundant in
  usability and accessibility testing.
• Find them through the trade conferences.

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Careers in Academia

• People move freely between academia and private
  industry and many projects are done using teams
  located in both places.
• Research and teaching jobs at universities
  require a Ph.D.
• Academia is more stable than industry and offers
  more freedom of choice of projects and interested
  students to help.

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Good Grad Schools

• Local Ph.D. level
• UC Irvine, UCSD, UCLA
• National Ph.D. level
• MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Georgia Tech, Cornell
• University of Michigan, UNC Chapel Hill, NYU
• M.S. Level
• University of Memphis
• New Mexico State University, Las Cruces