Chapter From the Lab to the Real World: Affect Recognition Using Multiple Cues and Modalities

Interdisciplinary concept of dissipative soliton is unfolded in connection with ultrafast fibre lasers. The different mode-locking techniques as well as experimental realizations of dissipative soliton fibre lasers are surveyed briefly with an emphasis on their energy scalability. Basic topics of the dissipative soliton theory are elucidated in connection with concepts of energy scalability and stability. It is shown that the parametric space of dissipative soliton has reduced dimension and comparatively simple structure that simplifies the analysis and optimization of ultrafast fibre lasers. The main destabilization scenarios are described and the limits of energy scalability are connected with impact of optical turbulence and stimulated Raman scattering. The fast and slow dynamics of vector dissipative solitons are exposed

Investigating Context Awareness of Affective Computing Systems: A Critical Approach

AbstractIntelligent Human Computer Interaction systems should be affective aware and Affective Computing systems should be context aware. Positioned in the cross-section of the research areas of Interaction Context and Affective Computing current paper investigates if and how context is incorporated in automatic analysis of human affective behavior. Several related aspects are discussed ranging from modeling, acquiring and annotating issues in affectively enhanced corpora to issues related to incorporating context information in a multimodal fusion framework of affective analysis. These aspects are critically discussed in terms of the challenges they comprise while, in a wider framework, future directions of this recently active, yet mainly unexplored, research area are identified. Overall, the paper aims to both document the present status as well as comment on the evolution of the upcoming topic of Context in Affective Computing

The recognition of acted interpersonal stance in police interrogations and the influence of actor proficiency

This paper reports on judgement studies regarding the perception of interpersonal stances taken by humans playing the role of a suspect in a police interrogation setting. Our project aims at building believable embodied conversational characters to play the role of suspects in a serious game for learning interrogation strategies. The main question we ask is: do human judges agree on the way they perceive the various aspects of stance taking, such as friendliness and dominance? Four types of stances were acted by eight amateur actors. Short recordings were shown in an online survey to subjects who were asked to describe them using a selection of a number of adjectives. Results of this annotation task are reported in this paper. We explain how we computed the inter-rater agreement with Krippendorff’s alpha statistics using a set theoretical distance metric. Results show that for some of the stance types observers agreed more than for others. Some actors are better than others, but validity (recognizing the intended stance) and inter-rater agreement do not always go hand in hand. We further investigate the effect the expertise of actors has on the perception of the stance that is acted. We compare the fragments from amateur actors to fragments from professional actors taken from popular TV-shows

An Actor-Centric Approach to Facial Animation Control by Neural Networks For Non-Player Characters in Video Games

Game developers increasingly consider the degree to which character animation emulates facial expressions found in cinema. Employing animators and actors to produce cinematic facial animation by mixing motion capture and hand-crafted animation is labor intensive and therefore expensive. Emotion corpora and neural network controllers have shown promise toward developing autonomous animation that does not rely on motion capture. Previous research and practice in disciplines of Computer Science, Psychology and the Performing Arts have provided frameworks on which to build a workflow toward creating an emotion AI system that can animate the facial mesh of a 3d non-player character deploying a combination of related theories and methods. However, past investigations and their resulting production methods largely ignore the emotion generation systems that have evolved in the performing arts for more than a century. We find very little research that embraces the intellectual process of trained actors as complex collaborators from which to understand and model the training of a neural network for character animation. This investigation demonstrates a workflow design that integrates knowledge from the performing arts and the affective branches of the social and biological sciences. Our workflow begins at the stage of developing and annotating a fictional scenario with actors, to producing a video emotion corpus, to designing training and validating a neural network, to analyzing the emotion data annotation of the corpus and neural network, and finally to determining resemblant behavior of its autonomous animation control of a 3d character facial mesh. The resulting workflow includes a method for the development of a neural network architecture whose initial efficacy as a facial emotion expression simulator has been tested and validated as substantially resemblant to the character behavior developed by a human actor

Perception of Blended Emotions: From Video Corpus to Expressive Agent

Abstract. Real life emotions are often blended and involve several simultane-ous superposed or masked emotions. This paper reports on a study on the per-ception of multimodal emotional behaviors in Embodied Conversational Agents. This experimental study aims at evaluating if people detect properly the signs of emotions in different modalities (speech, facial expressions, gestures) when they appear to be superposed or masked. We compared the perception of emotional behaviors annotated in a corpus of TV interviews and replayed by an expressive agent at different levels of abstraction. The results provide insights on the use of such protocols for studying the effect of various models and modalities on the perception of complex emotions.

An XML Coding Scheme for Multimodal Corpus Annotation

International audienceMultimodality has become one of today's most crucial challenges both for linguistics and computer science, entailing theoretical issues as well as practical ones (verbal interaction description, human-machine dialogues, virtual reality etc...). Understanding interaction processes is one of the main targets of these sciences, and requires to take into account the whole set of modalities and the way they interact.From a linguistic standpoint, language and speech analysis are based on studies of distinct research fields, such as phonetics, phonemics, syntax, semantics, pragmatics or gesture studies. Each of them have been investigated in the past either separately or in relation with another field that was considered as closely connected (e.g. syntax and semantics, prosody and syntax, etc.). The perspective adopted by modern linguistics is a considerably broader one: even though each domain reveals a certain degree of autonomy, it cannot be accounted for independently from its interactions with the other domains. Accordingly, the study of the interaction between the fields appears to be as important as the study of each distinct field. This is a pre-requisite for an elaboration of a valid theory of language. However, as important as the needs in this area might be, high level multimodal resources and adequate methods in order to construct them are scarce and unequally developed. Ongoing projects mainly focus on one modality as a main target, with an alternate modality as an optional complement. Moreover, coding standards in this field remain very partial and do not cover all the needs in terms of multimodal annotation. One of the first issues we have to face is the definition of a coding scheme providing adequate responses to the needs of the various levels encompassed, from phonetics to pragmatics or syntax. While working in the general context of international coding standards, we plan to create a specific coding standard designed to supply proper responses to the specific needs of multimodal annotation, as available solutions in the area do not seem to be totally satisfactory. <BR /

An XML Coding Scheme for Multimodal Corpus Annotation

International audienceMultimodality has become one of today's most crucial challenges both for linguistics and computer science, entailing theoretical issues as well as practical ones (verbal interaction description, human-machine dialogues, virtual reality etc...). Understanding interaction processes is one of the main targets of these sciences, and requires to take into account the whole set of modalities and the way they interact.From a linguistic standpoint, language and speech analysis are based on studies of distinct research fields, such as phonetics, phonemics, syntax, semantics, pragmatics or gesture studies. Each of them have been investigated in the past either separately or in relation with another field that was considered as closely connected (e.g. syntax and semantics, prosody and syntax, etc.). The perspective adopted by modern linguistics is a considerably broader one: even though each domain reveals a certain degree of autonomy, it cannot be accounted for independently from its interactions with the other domains. Accordingly, the study of the interaction between the fields appears to be as important as the study of each distinct field. This is a pre-requisite for an elaboration of a valid theory of language. However, as important as the needs in this area might be, high level multimodal resources and adequate methods in order to construct them are scarce and unequally developed. Ongoing projects mainly focus on one modality as a main target, with an alternate modality as an optional complement. Moreover, coding standards in this field remain very partial and do not cover all the needs in terms of multimodal annotation. One of the first issues we have to face is the definition of a coding scheme providing adequate responses to the needs of the various levels encompassed, from phonetics to pragmatics or syntax. While working in the general context of international coding standards, we plan to create a specific coding standard designed to supply proper responses to the specific needs of multimodal annotation, as available solutions in the area do not seem to be totally satisfactory. <BR /