55,588 research outputs found
Exploring the Affective Loop
Research in psychology and neurology shows that both body and mind are
involved when experiencing emotions (Damasio 1994, Davidson et al.
2003). People are also very physical when they try to communicate their
emotions. Somewhere in between beings consciously and unconsciously
aware of it ourselves, we produce both verbal and physical signs to make
other people understand how we feel. Simultaneously, this production of
signs involves us in a stronger personal experience of the emotions we
express.
Emotions are also communicated in the digital world, but there is little
focus on users' personal as well as physical experience of emotions in
the available digital media. In order to explore whether and how we can
expand existing media, we have designed, implemented and evaluated
/eMoto/, a mobile service for sending affective messages to others. With
eMoto, we explicitly aim to address both cognitive and physical
experiences of human emotions. Through combining affective gestures for
input with affective expressions that make use of colors, shapes and
animations for the background of messages, the interaction "pulls" the
user into an /affective loop/. In this thesis we define what we mean by
affective loop and present a user-centered design approach expressed
through four design principles inspired by previous work within Human
Computer Interaction (HCI) but adjusted to our purposes; /embodiment/
(Dourish 2001) as a means to address how people communicate emotions in
real life, /flow/ (Csikszentmihalyi 1990) to reach a state of
involvement that goes further than the current context, /ambiguity/ of
the designed expressions (Gaver et al. 2003) to allow for open-ended
interpretation by the end-users instead of simplistic, one-emotion
one-expression pairs and /natural but designed expressions/ to address
people's natural couplings between cognitively and physically
experienced emotions. We also present results from an end-user study of
eMoto that indicates that subjects got both physically and emotionally
involved in the interaction and that the designed "openness" and
ambiguity of the expressions, was appreciated and understood by our
subjects. Through the user study, we identified four potential design
problems that have to be tackled in order to achieve an affective loop
effect; the extent to which users' /feel in control/ of the interaction,
/harmony and coherence/ between cognitive and physical expressions/,/
/timing/ of expressions and feedback in a communicational setting, and
effects of users' /personality/ on their emotional expressions and
experiences of the interaction
Robust Modeling of Epistemic Mental States
This work identifies and advances some research challenges in the analysis of
facial features and their temporal dynamics with epistemic mental states in
dyadic conversations. Epistemic states are: Agreement, Concentration,
Thoughtful, Certain, and Interest. In this paper, we perform a number of
statistical analyses and simulations to identify the relationship between
facial features and epistemic states. Non-linear relations are found to be more
prevalent, while temporal features derived from original facial features have
demonstrated a strong correlation with intensity changes. Then, we propose a
novel prediction framework that takes facial features and their nonlinear
relation scores as input and predict different epistemic states in videos. The
prediction of epistemic states is boosted when the classification of emotion
changing regions such as rising, falling, or steady-state are incorporated with
the temporal features. The proposed predictive models can predict the epistemic
states with significantly improved accuracy: correlation coefficient (CoERR)
for Agreement is 0.827, for Concentration 0.901, for Thoughtful 0.794, for
Certain 0.854, and for Interest 0.913.Comment: Accepted for Publication in Multimedia Tools and Application, Special
Issue: Socio-Affective Technologie
Agents for educational games and simulations
This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications
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