Preface of the Proceedings of the Doctoral Consortium

This volume collects the contributions presented at the ACII 2009 Doctoral Consortium, the event aimed at gathering PhD students with the goal of sharing ideas about the theories behind affective computing; its development; and its application. Published papers have been selected out a large number of high quality submissions covering a wide spectrum of topics including the analysis of human-human, human-machine and human-robot interactions, the analysis of physiology and nonverbal behavior in affective phenomena, the effect of emotions on language and spoken interaction, and the embodiment of affective behaviors

Livelihood, locality and globalisation

Inaugural lecture Katholieke Universiteit Nijmege

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.

Using Virtual Agents to Guide Attention in Multi-task Scenarios

Kulms P, Kopp S. Using Virtual Agents to Guide Attention in Multi-task Scenarios. In: Aylett R, Krenn B, Pelachaud C, Shimodaira H, eds. Intelligent Virtual Agents. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol 8108. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg; 2013: 295-302

The MPI Facial Expression Database — A Validated Database of Emotional and Conversational Facial Expressions

The ability to communicate is one of the core aspects of human life. For this, we use not only verbal but also nonverbal signals of remarkable complexity. Among the latter, facial expressions belong to the most important information channels. Despite the large variety of facial expressions we use in daily life, research on facial expressions has so far mostly focused on the emotional aspect. Consequently, most databases of facial expressions available to the research community also include only emotional expressions, neglecting the largely unexplored aspect of conversational expressions. To fill this gap, we present the MPI facial expression database, which contains a large variety of natural emotional and conversational expressions. The database contains 55 different facial expressions performed by 19 German participants. Expressions were elicited with the help of a method-acting protocol, which guarantees both well-defined and natural facial expressions. The method-acting protocol was based on every-day scenarios, which are used to define the necessary context information for each expression. All facial expressions are available in three repetitions, in two intensities, as well as from three different camera angles. A detailed frame annotation is provided, from which a dynamic and a static version of the database have been created. In addition to describing the database in detail, we also present the results of an experiment with two conditions that serve to validate the context scenarios as well as the naturalness and recognizability of the video sequences. Our results provide clear evidence that conversational expressions can be recognized surprisingly well from visual information alone. The MPI facial expression database will enable researchers from different research fields (including the perceptual and cognitive sciences, but also affective computing, as well as computer vision) to investigate the processing of a wider range of natural facial expressions