Picard holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering with highest honors from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and master's and doctorate degrees, both in electrical engineering and computer science, from MIT. Prior to joining the MIT Media Lab faculty in 1991, she was a member of the technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories, where she designed VLSI chips optimized for signal processing and developed new image compression techniques.
Picard's early research at MIT created new mathematical models that helped achieve the first content-based retrieval of digital images; her work also pioneered methods of automated search and annotation in digital video, including the creation of the Photobook system. As she studied human mechanisms of perception, she became convinced of the importance of emotion for making artificial intelligence (AI) that would be both smarter and better at interacting with people; she subsequently wrote the book Affective Computing, which became instrumental in starting a new field by that name. Today that field has its own journal, international conference, and professional society. Picard also served as a founding member of the IEEE Technical Committee on Wearable Information Systems in 1998, helping launch the field of wearable computing.
Picard is an active inventor with patents including wearable and non-contact sensors, algorithms, and systems for sensing, recognizing, and responding respectfully to human affective information. Her inventions have applications in autism, epilepsy, depression, PTSD, sleep, stress, dementia, autonomic nervous system disorders, human and machine learning, health behavior change, market research, customer service, and human-computer interaction, and are in use by thousands of research teams worldwide as well as in many products and services.
