ICS News Archive

Bringing emotional intelligence to artificial intelligence

Karishma and Pratyush Muthukumar play to each other’s strengths. Over the years, the siblings, UCI alumni, have tag-teamed many projects together, employing their respective expertise in cognitive science and computer science. Their current project: developing an empathetic chatbot for use in the medical field.

“There’s a lot of buzz around ChatGPT and similar language models that are coming out around this time, but we wanted to gear a chatbot specifically designed to consider empathy and compassion in responses,” says Pratyush Muthukumar, the younger of the pair. “Patients suffering from depression, anxiety or other mental health challenges might be able to talk with a chatbot that’s empathetic.”

He and his sister both graduated from UCI in 2022, Pratyush with a degree in computer science and Karishma in cognitive science.

She was invited by the United Nations to be a speaker at the AI for Good global summit in 2020, but it was delayed several years due to the pandemic. When organizers reached out again in 2022, she suggested a joint talk with her brother on their recent research together at UCI. Finally, the two Southern California natives will be making their way to Europe in July for a presentation on emotion-driven AI at the summit, in Geneva, Switzerland.

Read the full story on UCI News.