Dan White

Biography

Dr. Daniel White is a Research Affiliate in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He earned his PhD in anthropology from Rice University and holds MA degrees in Japanese literature and Asia-Pacific Studies. His research documents how different cultural imaginaries of emotional wellbeing, largely from Japan, are shaping diverse futures for artificial emotional intelligence. He currently co-organizes an ethnographic research project called Model Emotion, in which he works across disciplines with anthropologists, psychologists, computer scientists and robotics engineers to trace and critique how theoretical models of emotion are built into machines with the capacity to evoke, read or even in a philosophical sense ‘have’ emotion in ways that foster care and wellbeing. He increasingly researches how Buddhist and other contemplative approaches to emotion can diversify emotional models applied to artificial intelligence. His publications, podcasts and other projects can be found at www.modelemotion.org.