People Sense refers to the remarkable capacity of humans to sense and have a commonsense understanding of others’ affective-cognitive states and behaviors. Partly genetically pre-disposed, partly influenced by environmental factors, the ability to understand and predict people’s behavior varies from person to person and even within the same individual.

Successful people-sensing varies with level of stress, availability of social stimuli (or lack of as in computer-mediated communication) and with time available. Failures of people sense are common, lying at the root of countless arguments, misunderstandings and hurt feelings.

In this talk Rana el Kaliouby will present technologies with people sense, an emerging area of research that can improve people’s ability to “connect” to others; advance social-emotional intelligence in machines to improve people’s experience with technology, and build technologies and models that facilitate real-world testing of the mechanisms underlying social cognition, their developmental trajectory and their possible derailed development in pervasive developmental disorders such as autism.