Emotion Detection Using Noninvasive Low Cost Sensors

Emotion recognition from biometrics is relevant to a wide range of application domains, including healthcare. Existing approaches usually adopt multi-electrodes sensors that could be expensive or uncomfortable to be used in real-life situations. In this study, we investigate whether we can reliably recognize high vs. low emotional valence and arousal by relying on noninvasive low cost EEG, EMG, and GSR sensors. We report the results of an empirical study involving 19 subjects. We achieve state-of-the- art classification performance for both valence and arousal even in a cross-subject classification setting, which eliminates the need for individual training and tuning of classification models.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of ACII 2017, the Seventh International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction, San Antonio, TX, USA, Oct. 23-26, 201

How to Ask for Technical Help? Evidence-based Guidelines for Writing Questions on Stack Overflow

Context: The success of Stack Overflow and other community-based question-and-answer (Q&A) sites depends mainly on the will of their members to answer others' questions. In fact, when formulating requests on Q&A sites, we are not simply seeking for information. Instead, we are also asking for other people's help and feedback. Understanding the dynamics of the participation in Q&A communities is essential to improve the value of crowdsourced knowledge. Objective: In this paper, we investigate how information seekers can increase the chance of eliciting a successful answer to their questions on Stack Overflow by focusing on the following actionable factors: affect, presentation quality, and time. Method: We develop a conceptual framework of factors potentially influencing the success of questions in Stack Overflow. We quantitatively analyze a set of over 87K questions from the official Stack Overflow dump to assess the impact of actionable factors on the success of technical requests. The information seeker reputation is included as a control factor. Furthermore, to understand the role played by affective states in the success of questions, we qualitatively analyze questions containing positive and negative emotions. Finally, a survey is conducted to understand how Stack Overflow users perceive the guideline suggestions for writing questions. Results: We found that regardless of user reputation, successful questions are short, contain code snippets, and do not abuse with uppercase characters. As regards affect, successful questions adopt a neutral emotional style. Conclusion: We provide evidence-based guidelines for writing effective questions on Stack Overflow that software engineers can follow to increase the chance of getting technical help. As for the role of affect, we empirically confirmed community guidelines that suggest avoiding rudeness in question writing.Comment: Preprint, to appear in Information and Software Technolog

EmoTxt: A Toolkit for Emotion Recognition from Text

We present EmoTxt, a toolkit for emotion recognition from text, trained and tested on a gold standard of about 9K question, answers, and comments from online interactions. We provide empirical evidence of the performance of EmoTxt. To the best of our knowledge, EmoTxt is the first open-source toolkit supporting both emotion recognition from text and training of custom emotion classification models.Comment: In Proc. 7th Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII'17), San Antonio, TX, USA, Oct. 23-26, 2017, p. 79-80, ISBN: 978-1-5386-0563-

Using Personality Detection Tools for Software Engineering Research: How Far Can We Go?

Assessing the personality of software engineers may help to match individual traits with the characteristics of development activities such as code review and testing, as well as support managers in team composition. However, self-assessment questionnaires are not a practical solution for collecting multiple observations on a large scale. Instead, automatic personality detection, while overcoming these limitations, is based on off-the-shelf solutions trained on non-technical corpora, which might not be readily applicable to technical domains like software engineering. In this paper, we first assess the performance of general-purpose personality detection tools when applied to a technical corpus of developers’ emails retrieved from the public archives of the Apache Software Foundation. We observe a general low accuracy of predictions and an overall disagreement among the tools. Second, we replicate two previous research studies in software engineering by replacing the personality detection tool used to infer developers’ personalities from pull-request discussions and emails. We observe that the original results are not confirmed, i.e., changing the tool used in the original study leads to diverging conclusions. Our results suggest a need for personality detection tools specially targeted for the software engineering domain

KGTorrent: A dataset of python jupyter notebooks from kaggle

Computational notebooks have become the tool of choice for many data scientists and practitioners for performing analyses and disseminating results. Despite their increasing popularity, the research community cannot yet count on a large, curated dataset of computational notebooks. In this paper, we fill this gap by introducing KGTorrent, a dataset of Python Jupyter notebooks with rich metadata retrieved from Kaggle, a platform hosting data science competitions for learners and practitioners with any levels of expertise. We describe how we built KGTorrent, and provide instructions on how to use it and refresh the collection to keep it up to date. Our vision is that the research community will use KGTorrent to study how data scientists, especially practitioners, use Jupyter Notebook in the wild and identify potential shortcomings to inform the design of its future extensions

The Role of Social Media in Affective Trust Building in Customer-Supplier Relationships

Trust represents a key issue in building successful customer-supplier relationships. In this sense, social software represents a powerful means for fostering trust by establishing a direct, more personal communication channel with customers. Therefore, companies are now investing in so-cial media for building their social digital brand and strengthening relationships with their cus-tomers. In this paper, we presented two experiments by means of which we investigated the role of traditional websites and social media in trust building along the cognitive and affective di-mensions. We hypothesize that traditional websites (content-oriented) and social media (interac-tion-oriented) may have a different effect on trust building in customer-supplier relationships, based on the first impression provided to potential customers. Although additional research is still needed, our findings add to the existing body of evidence that both cognitive and affective trust can be successfully fostered through online presence. Specifically, social media provides companies with tools to communicate benevolence to potential customer and, therefore, foster the affective commitment of customers. Traditional websites, instead, are more appropriate for communicating the competence and reliability of a company, by fostering trust building along the cognitive dimension. The results of our studies provide implications for researchers and practi-tioners, by highlighting the importance of combining the two media for effectively building a trustworthy online company image

A Taxonomy of Tools for Reproducible Machine Learning Experiments

The broad availability of machine learning (ML) libraries and frameworks makes the rapid prototyping of ML models a relatively easy task to achieve. However, the quality of prototypes is challenged by their reproducibility. Reproducing an ML experiment typically entails repeating the whole process, from data collection to model building, other than multiple optimization steps that must be carefully tracked. In this paper, we define a comprehensive taxonomy to characterize tools for ML experiment tracking and review some of the most popular solutions under the lens of the taxonomy. The taxonomy and related recommendations may help data scientists to more easily orient themselves and make an informed choice when selecting appropriate tools to shape the workflow of their ML experiments