Identifying Emergent Leadership in Small Groups using Nonverbal Communicative Cues

This paper addresses firstly an analysis on how an emergent leader is perceived in newly formed small-groups, and secondly, explore correlations between perception of leadership and automatically extracted nonverbal communicative cues. We hypothesize that the difference in individual nonverbal features between emergent leaders and non-emergent leaders is significant and measurable using speech activity. Our results on a new interaction corpus show that such an approach is promising, identifying the emergent leader with an accuracy of up to 80

Emergent leaders through looking and speaking: from audio-visual data to multimodal recognition

In this paper we present a multimodal analysis of emergent leadership in small groups using audio-visual features and discuss our experience in designing and collecting a data corpus for this purpose. The ELEA Audio-Visual Synchronized corpus (ELEA AVS) was collected using a light portable setup and contains recordings of small group meetings. The participants in each group performed the winter survival task and filled in questionnaires related to personality and several social concepts such as leadership and dominance. In addition, the corpus includes annotations on participants' performance in the survival task, and also annotations of social concepts from external viewers. Based on this corpus, we present the feasibility of predicting the emergent leader in small groups using automatically extracted audio and visual features, based on speaking turns and visual attention, and we focus specifically on multimodal features that make use of the looking at participants while speaking and looking at while not speaking measures. Our findings indicate that emergent leadership is related, but not equivalent, to dominance, and while multimodal features bring a moderate degree of effectiveness in inferring the leader, much simpler features extracted from the audio channel are found to give better performanc

Análise computacional de aspetos de comunicação não verbal em contextos de grupo

Human communication is a major field of study in psychology and social sciences. Topics such as emergent leadership and group dynamics are commonly studied cases when referring to group settings. Experiments regarding group settings are usually analyzed in conversational and collaborative tasks environments in order to study the communication process in small groups. Former studies’ methods involve human analysis and manual annotation of others’ behaviors in communication settings. Later studies try to replace time consuming and failure prone annotations by resorting to computational methods. Having a custom, newly-gathered audiovisual dataset, from an experiment conducted by the Department of Education and Psychology of the University of Aveiro, a multidisciplinary group from the same institution with members from psychology and engineering backgrounds, took the initiative to create computational methods in order to facilitate the analysis of the collected data. For that purpose, this work presents a multimodal computational framework using state-of-the-art methods in computer vision, capable of enriching image data with annotations of a broad range of nonverbal communication aspects, both at an individual and group levels, thus facilitating the study of nonverbal communication and group dynamics. This works contributes to the community by presenting methods to directly increase human knowledge about the human communication process, involving data transformation processes in order to transform raw feature data into humanly understandable meanings and a visualization tool capable of visualizing such methods applied to the input data.A comunicação humana é uma grande área de estudo na psicologia e ciências sociais. Temas como liderança emergente e dinâmicas de grupo são temas frequentemente estudados quando se estudam contextos de grupo. Dentro da área de estudos sobre contextos de grupo analisam-se situações de conversação e realização de tarefas colaborativas em grupos de pequena dimensão. Estudos primordiais envolviam análise e anotação humana para a anotação dos comportamentos revelados nas experiências realizadas, equanto que estudos mais recentes tendem a adotar métodos computacionais de forma a susbtituir os métodos anteriormente usados por serem dispendiosos em termos de tempo e propícios a erros. Tendo como caso de estudo um conjunto de dados audiovisuais de uma experiência realizada pelo Departamento de Educação e Psicologia da Universidade de Aveiro, um grupo de investigação multidisciplinar das áreas da psicologia e engenharia tomou a iniciativa de desenvolver métodos computacionais capazes de facilitar o processo de análise dos dados recolhidos. Como tal, este trabalho apresenta uma abordagem computacional multimodal, utilizando métodos "Estado da arte", capaz de enriquecer os dados visuais com anotações de uma larga extensão de aspetos de comunicação não-verbal, tanto a nível individual como de grupo, facilitando assim o estudo da comunicação em geral e das dinâmicas de grupo. Este trabalho contribui para a comunidade, fornecendo métodos para aumentar o conhecimento existente sobre o processo de comunicação humana, incluindo processos de transformação de dados, desde dados numéricos de baixa interpretação para informação interpretável e compreensível, assim como uma ferramenta de visualização capaz de apresentar tais métodos aplicados aos dados de entrada.Mestrado em Engenharia Informátic

A Nonverbal Behavior Approach to Identify Emergent Leaders in Small Groups

dentifying emergent leaders in organizations is a key issue in organizational behavioral research, and a new problem in social computing. This paper presents an analysis on how an emergent leader is perceived in newly formed, small groups, and then tackles the task of automatically inferring emergent leaders, using a variety of communicative nonverbal cues extracted from audio and video channels. The inference task uses rule-based and collective classification approaches with the combination of acoustic and visual features extracted from a new small group corpus specifically collected to analyze the emergent leadership phenomenon. Our results show that the emergent leader is perceived by his/her peers as an active and dominant person; that visual information augments acoustic information; and that adding relational information to the nonverbal cues improves the inference of each participant's leadership rankings in the group

Signal Processing in the Workplace

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, during 2013 employed Americans "worked an average of 7.6 hours on the days they worked," and "83% did some or all of their work at their workplace" [1]. Understanding processes in the workplace has been the subject of disciplines like organizational psychology and management for decades. In particular, the study of nonverbal communication at work is fundamental as "face-to-face interaction with superiors, subordinates, and peers consumes much of our time and energy" [2] and a variety of phenomena including job stress, rapport, and leadership can be revealed by and perceived from the tone of voice, gaze, facial expressions, and body cues of coworkers and managers [2]. ©2015IEEE

Essays in Leadership Communication

This work centers around leadership communication: how our (dis)information-rich and uncertain global environment has posed challenges to and offered opportunities for this key leadership behavior, and how leaders engage in difficult communications with their stakeholders. I focus on leader-stakeholder two-way dynamics to investigate leader communication in critical moments when they deliver undesirable information to their stakeholders and respond to tough questions from their stakeholders. Essay I reviews research on leader communication and discusses those challenges and opportunities. Essay II uses 107 million Twitter posts to examine stakeholder responses to political leaders’ COVID-19 communications and illustrates the evolving leader-stakeholder relationship throughout different phases of the global pandemic. Essay III explores organizational leaders’ response strategies when facing difficult questions from stakeholders in high-stakes corporate environments. In conclusion, I aim to highlight leaders’ indispensable responsibilities to communicate effectively, benevolently, and responsibly, enhancing the field’s current understanding of crisis leadership, followership, and strategic leadership

Killer Apps: Developing Novel Applications That Enhance Team Coordination, Communication, and Effectiveness

As part of the Lorentz workshop, “Interdisciplinary Insights into Group and Team Dynamics,” held in Leiden, Netherlands, this article describes how Geeks and Groupies (computer and social scientists) may benefit from interdisciplinary collaboration toward the development of killer apps in team contexts that are meaningful and challenging for both. First, we discuss interaction processes during team meetings as a research topic for both Groupies and Geeks. Second, we highlight teamwork in health care settings as an interdisciplinary research challenge. Third, we discuss how an automated solution for optimal team design could benefit team effectiveness and feed into team-based interventions. Fourth, we discuss team collaboration in massive open online courses as a challenge for both Geeks and Groupies. We argue for the necessary integration of social and computational research insights and approaches. In the hope of inspiring future interdisciplinary collaborations, we develop criteria for evaluating killer apps—including the four proposed here—and discuss future research challenges and opportunities that potentially derive from these developments

Teaching Language to Students with Autism

This meta-synthesis of the literature on methods of instruction to students with ASD examines the various methods of teaching language to students with ASD. While each student learns language at his or her own pace, the author has found that certain methods yield results quicker, and these methods need to be examined critically for any literature on their reliability, efficacy, and scientific research. If a student with autism can be taught language quickly, therefore mitigating any further delays in academic development relative to peers, then this methodology should be made accessible to all teachers of such students

Theories and Models of Teams and Groups

This article describes some of the theoretical approaches used by social scientists as well as those used by computer scientists to study the team and group phenomena. The purpose of this article is to identify ways in which these different fields can share and develop theoretical models and theoretical approaches, in an effort to gain a better understanding and further develop team and group research