Automatic Affect Recognition: Why, What and How?

Abstract 

Computing that is sensitive to affective and social phenomena aims to equip devices and interfaces  with the means to interpret, understand, and respond to human communicative and social behaviour, emotions, moods, and, possibly, intentions in a naturalistic way - similar to the way humans rely on their senses to assess each other’s communicative and affective state. 

This talk will give a brief summary of automatic affect recognition and will focus on answering three main questions: 1) why is affect recognition needed? 2) what is automatic affect recognition about? 3) how is automatic affect recognition achieved? The talk will also present three arguments by providing an overview of the works I have conducted in the field: 1) multicue and multimodal affect recognition is superior to single cue affect recognition, 2) dealing with spontaneous affective behaviour is rather challenging compared to posed affective behaviour, 3) dimensional and continuous affect analysis is the way forward for naturalistic applications.

Short Bio

Dr Hatice Gunes is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), UK. Prior to joining QMUL, she was a postdoctoral researcher at Imperial College London, UK and an Associate of the Faculty of IT at University of Technology Sydney, Australia. Her research interests lie in the areas of affective computing, visual information processing, and machine learning, focusing on affective data acquisition and annotation, automatic behaviour analysis, multicue and multimodal affect prediction and recognition. She has published more than 60 technical papers in these areas, and her work to date has received more than 1180 citations (current H-index equals 19). Dr Gunes has served as a Steering Committee member of IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, Guest Editor of Special Issues in Int’l J. of Synthetic Emotions and Image and Vision Computing, member of the Editorial Advisory Board for the Affective Computing and Interaction Book (2011), main organiser of the EmoSPACE Workshops at IEEE FG'13 and FG'11, workshop chair of HBU’13 and AC4MobHCI'12, area chair for ACM Multimedia’14, IEEE ICME’13, ACM ICMI’13 and ACII’13, and as a general workshop chair for BCS HCI’12. For her research in affective computing, she was a recipient of a number of awards for Outstanding Paper (IEEE FG’11), Quality Reviewer (IEEE ICME’11), Best Demo (IEEE ACII’09), and Best Student Paper (VisHCI’06). She is currently involved in several projects funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council UK (EPSRC) and the British Council.