The Panic Room: On Synthetic Emotions

Emotions and feelings are basic regulators of human activity. We consider that intelligence is an emergent property of systems and that emotions play a basic role within those systems. Our main aim is to create a system (called The Panic Room) based on a bottom-up “Ambient Intelligence” context which develops a proto-emotion of fear and pleasure in order to detect a dangerous event and react to it. The system labels the signals from the sensors which describe the surroundings as either negative or positive. Either option has a specific signal that is used to change the way further perceptual signals will be processed as well as generate possible behavioural responses to a possible danger. Responses are automatic and embedded (or hardwired) in the system.

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