Picard is a language (or a set of languages) closely related to French, and as such is one of the larger group of Romance languages. It is spoken in two regions in the far north of France—Nord-Pas-de-Calais and Picardy—and in parts of the Belgian region of Wallonia, the district of Tournai (Wallonie Picarde) and a part of the district of Mons (toward Tournai and the Belgian border).

Picard is known by several different names. Residents of Picardie simply call it picard, whereas it is more commonly known as chti or chtimi in the south part of French Flanders (around Lille and Douai) and in North-East Artois (around Béthune and Lens), or rouchi around Valenciennes; or simply as patois by Northerners in general. Linguists group all of these under the name Picard. In general the variety spoken in Picardy is understood by speakers in Nord-Pas-de-Calais, and vice versa.

Belgium's French Community gave full official recognition to Picard as a regional language along with Walloon, Gaumais (Lorraine), Champenois (Champagne) and German Frankish in its 1990 decree. The French government has not followed suit and recognised Picard as a regional language (this is in line with its policy of linguistic unity, which allows for only one official language in France), although some reports have recognized Picard as a language distinct from French.

Rosalind W. Picard (born May 17, 1962 in Massachusetts) is Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, director and also the founder of the Affective Computing Research Group at the MIT Media Lab, and co-director of the Things That Think Consortium. In 2005, she was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Picard is credited with starting the branch of computer science known as affective computing with the publication of Affective Computing. This textbook described the importance that recognizing human emotions has to relationships between people, and the possible effects of such recognition by robots. Her work in this field has led to an expansion into autism research and developing devices that could help humans recognize nuances in human emotions.

Picard holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and a certificate in computer engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology (1984), and master's (1986) and doctorate degrees (1991), both in electrical engineering and computer science, from MIT. Her thesis was titled Texture Modeling: Temperature Effects on Markov/Gibbs Random Fields. She has been a member of the faculty at the MIT Media Laboratory since 1991, with tenure since 1998 and a full professorship since 2005.