JoyBot: can we develop technology that steers people toward behaviors that make them happier?
JoyBot
We make many decisions on a daily basis. However, it is easy to be sidetracked by urgent needs and short term goals, but fail to attend to activities that contribute to our long-term well-being and happiness. At RIT, one of our main research projects asks the basic question: can we develop technology that steers people toward behaviors that make them happier? Our work is inspired by psychology research, especially a field known as The Science of Happiness.
We are developing “Joybot” – an agent that helps you record your happy moments, generalizes from them, and helps you create plans that increase your happiness. Naturally, this is no easy feat. Joybot raises many exciting technical challenges for NLP, chatbot construction, and interface design: how can we build an interface that’s useful but not intrusive.
We are also working on creating a research platform that helps psychology researchers take advantage of the advancements in large-scale data collection and natural language processing. We hope the data science techniques Joybot develops can be used to drive the state-of-the-art in psychology research.
Sponsored by Recruit Institute of Technology, Inc