DaFEx: Database of Facial Expressions

DaFEx (Database of Facial Expressions) is a database created with the purpose of providing a benchmark for the evaluation of the facial expressivity of Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs). DaFEx consists of 1008 short videos containing emotional facial expressions of the 6 Ekman’s emotions plus the neutral expression. The facial expressions were recorded by 8 italian professional actors (4 male and 4 female) in two acting conditions (“utterance” and “no- utterance”) and at 3 intensity levels (high, medium, low). Very much attention has been paid to image quality and framing. The high number of videos, the number of variables considered, and the very good video quality, make of DaFEx a reference corpus both for the evaluation of ECAs and the research in emotion psychology

Conceptual Design and Evaluation of WIRE: A Wisdom-Aware EUD Tool

This paper presents the evaluation of the conceptual design of WIRE, a EUD tool for service-based applications. WIRE exploits community composition knowledge harvested from existing programs defined by other developers in the same domain. Such knowledge can assist less skilled developers in defining the composition they need, allowing them to go beyond their individual ca-pabilities. The assistance comes in the form of interactive contextual advices proposed during the definition of composition logic. This idea was evaluated with 10 semi-structured interviews with University accountants. A rich set of information was elicited by means of several probes, including examples of contextual helps, commercial EUD tools, and scenarios in the form of positive and negative user stories. Results informed the definition of a set of require-ments for WIRE, and fostered a critical reflection on possibilities and limita-tions of the general framework of EUD

The Properties of DaFEx, a Database of Kinetic Facial Expressions

In this paper we present an evaluation study for DaFEx (Database of Facial Expressions), a database created with the purpose of providing a benchmark for the evaluation of the facial expressivity of Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs). DaFEx consists of 1008 short videos containing emotional facial expressions of the 6 Ekman’s emotions plus the neutral expression. The facial expressions were recorded by 8 professional actors (male and female) in two acting conditions (“utterance” and “non utterance”) and at 3 intensity levels (high, medium, low). The properties of DaFEx were studied by having 80 subjects classify the emotion expressed in the videos. We tested the effect of the intensity level, of the articulatory movements due to speech, and of the actors’ and subjects’ gender, on classification accuracy. We also studied the way error distribute across confusion classes. The results are summarized in this work

A first evaluation study of a database of kinetic facial expressions (DaFEx)

In this paper we present DaFEx (Database of Facial Expressions), a database created with the purpose of providing a benchmark for the evaluation of the facial expressivity of Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs). DaFEx consists of 1008 short videos containing emotional facial expressions of the 6 Ekman`s emotions plus the neutral expression. The facial expressions were recorded by 8 professional actors (male and female) in two acting conditions (`utterance` and `no- utterance`) and at 3 intensity levels (high, medium, low). The properties of DaFEx were studied by having 80 subjects classify the emotion expressed in the videos. High rates of accuracy were obtained for most of the emotions displayed. We also tested the effect of the intensity level, of the articulatory movements due to speech, and of the actors` and subjects` gender, on classification accuracy. The results showed that decoding accuracy decreases with the intensity of emotions; that the presence of articulatory movements negatively affects the recognition of fear, surprise and of the neutral expression, while it improves the recognition of anger; and that facial expressions seem to be recognized (slightly) better when acted by actresses than by actors

The Role of Psychological Ownership and Ownership Markers in Collaborative Working Environment

In this paper, we present a study concerning psychological ownership for digital entities in the context of collaborative working environments. In the first part of the paper we present a conceptual framework of ownership: various issues such as definition, effects, target factors and behavioral manifestation are explicated. We then focus on ownership marking, a behavioral manifestation that is closely tied to psychological ownership. We designed an experiment using DiamondTouch Table to investigate the effect of two of the most widely used ownership markers on users ’ attitudes and performance. Both performance and attitudinal differences were found, suggesting the significant role of ownership and ownership markers in the groupware and interactive workspaces design