This keynote introduces recent research on the automated analysis of non-verbal expressive gesture and of expressive social interaction in groups of users, for applications in novel multimodal interfaces and emerging User-Centric Media.

In this paper we present a case study on The Open Racing Car Simulator (TORCS) video game with the aim of developing a classifier to recognize user enjoyment from physiological signals. Three classes of enjoyment, derived from pairwise comparison of ...

Training datasets containing spontaneous emotional expressions are often imperfect due the ambiguities and difficulties of labeling such data by human observers. In this paper, we present a Random Sampling Consensus (RANSAC) based training approach for ...

Automatic feature selection is a critical step towards the generation of successful computational models of affect. This paper presents a genetic search-based feature selection method which is developed as a global-search algorithm for improving the ...

Valid, reliable and quick measurement of emotion and affect is an important challenge for the use of emotion and affect in human-technology interaction. Emotion and affect can be measured in two different ways: explicit, the user is asked for feedback, ...

Many approaches to the analysis and synthesis of facial expressions rely on automatically tracking landmark points on human faces. However, this approach is usually chosen because of ease of tracking rather than its ability to convey affect. We have ...

This paper describes work-in-progress on a study to create models of responses of virtual agents that are selected only based on non-content features, such as prosody and facial expressions. From a corpus of human-human interactions, in which one person ...

In order for robots to be socially accepted and generate empathy they must display emotions. For robots such as Nao, body language is the best medium available, as they do not have the ability to display facial expressions. Displaying emotional body ...

Empathy is a very important capability in human social relationships. If we aim to build artificial companions (agents or robots) capable of establishing long-term relationships with users, they should be able to understand the user's affective state ...

There is a growing interest in studying the potential of including models of emotion in Embodied Pedagogical Agents (EPA), included in Computer-Assisted Learning (CAL) software. Children's understanding and response to emotions matures alongside their ...

Robots acting as assistants or companions in a social environment must be capable of sensing information about the location of the users and analysing and interpreting their social, affective signals in order to be able to plan and generate an ...

This paper describes our work in progress to develop a personal monitoring system that can monitor the physical and emotional condition of a patient by using contextual information from a sensor network, provide the patient with feedback concerning ...

This paper presents a survey in which participants were asked to interpret non-linguistic utterances made by two different types of robot, one humanoid robot and one pet-like robot. The study set out to answer the question of whether the interpretation ...

Human interaction in natural environments relies on a variety of perceptual cues to guide and stabilize the interaction. Humanoid robots are becoming increasingly refined in their sensorimotor capabilities, and thus should be able to manipulate and ...

We focus on audio cues required for the interaction between a human and a robot. We argue that a multi-level use of different paralinguistic cues is needed to pilot the decisions of the robot. Our challenge is to know how to use them to pilot the human-...

In the present work we observe two subjects interacting in a colla­borative task on a shared environment. One goal of the experiment is to measure the change in behavior with respect to gaze when one interact­ant is wearing dark glasses and hence his/...

We claim that the concept from human-human social interactions can be expanded and utilized to facilitate, inform, and predict human-computer interaction and perceptions. By expanding on a qualitative model of politeness proposed by Brown and Levinson ...

Watching, sharing and discussing photographs represents an important social experience with profound emotional connotations. Although digital photoware allows multiple opportunities for indexing, retrieval and visualization of captured photographs, it ...