Vermont International Film Festival Burlington, VT
Dr. Chris Danforth
Professor of Mathematics & Statistics, University of Vermont
Agent of Happiness— Are we happy yet?
Program Description
The film Agent of Happiness focuses on Tibet's unique Happiness Index, which is a gauge they have created for measuring personal happiness through use of a detailed survey. Chris Danforth, who has developed a real-time remote sensor for global happiness using online interactions, discusses his team’s work with happiness, his methodologies, and the inherent issues/conflicts with 'measuring happiness' in the first place. He compares his team's work (and conclusions) with those seen in the film.
Presented At
Vermont International Film Festival Burlington, VT
Film Synopsis
Amber, a happiness agent, travels the Bhutanese Himalayas surveying people's happiness. On his remote mountain journey, he searches for fulfillment.
How do we quantify happiness? In Bhutan, the self-proclaimed happiest country in the world, they have a mathematical formula for it. In the lovely and fascinating Agent of Happiness, directors Arun Bhattari and Dorottya Zurbo follow two government Happiness Agents as they trek through the Himalayas, assessing people’s contentment, even as their own could use a boost.
Agent of Happiness has no axe to grind with the current system, though it does suggest that there may be nuance to our feelings that can’t quite be harnessed by a 1-10 scale. Instead, it focuses on people, mostly our agents, Amber and Guna, but also the many other people along their staggeringly beautiful Himalayan route. Gorgeously shot, quirky, and full of heart. Agent of Happiness is a thoroughly winning film. — Vermont International Film Festival
Photo credit: Dogwoof
About the Speaker
Chris Danforth is a Professor of Mathematics & Statistics at the University of Vermont, where he directs the Vermont Advanced Computing Center, and along with Peter Sheridan Dodds runs the Computational Story Lab research group at the Vermont Complex Systems Center. He is the co-inventor of hedonometer, a socio-technical instrument estimating daily happiness based on social media, and has also developed algorithms to identify predictors of depression from Instagram photos. Danforth has co-authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications applying mathematical techniques to many fields including atmospheric science, linguistics, psychology, literature, finance, physics, engineering, and biochemistry. Descriptions of his projects are available at his website: http://uvm.edu/~cdanfort