Advancements and Role of Emotion Recognition in the 4th Industrial Revolution

Emotions are ubiquitous to human life. Previous studies suggest that ninety percent of the life experience of humankind is affected by at least one emotion, and that emotional state guides their thoughts and behavior. The neurological study suggests that the design of human brain ensures that the emotional brain almost always influences the rational brain. Which means every rational decision is affected by the underlying emotional state. For decades, the influence of emotional states on human life has been overlooked by the AI researchers until recently. For the last twenty years, the study on different aspects of emotions and its detection for the more significant cause is gaining considerable attention and importance. With the advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already touching new heights and in this context successful detection of emotional states by AI systems will be another big leap towards more realistic social AI agents. This chapter will discuss in detail the importance and recent technological advancements towards emotion recognition (ER) in the backdrop of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. ER uses different types of human physical and behavioral expressions, such as facial features, speech features, and their variants. Deep Learning (DL) has emerged as one of the prominent pillars of 4IR. ER task extensively uses DL techniques for classifying different emotions. So, this chapter includes a discussion of relevant technical aspects of DL. Finally, it includes a brief description of a newly proposed Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) model as a case study of the ER systems.