I am grateful for have been invited for a Distinguished Guest Talk in the School of Computing Research Seminar Series at Ulster University –  the largest university in Northern Ireland and the second-largest university on the island of Ireland.

Thank you all!

Summary

Emotion AI is a subset of artificial intelligence that studies and develops systems and devices to recognize, interpret, process, simulate, and react to human emotions. It is an interdisciplinary field spanning computer science, psychology, and cognitive science and represents a step forward in human-computer interaction. Imagine a world in which machines have emotional intelligence, i.e., they can understand the emotional state of humans and adapt their behavior to give appropriate (empathetic) responses to those emotions. Consider these examples: (1) an intelligent tutor detecting students’ affect can realize and respond to a student’s need for support, such as to provide encouraging comments, alter the level of feedback and hints, or adjust task difficulty; (2) a video game can become more compelling by using players’ affect as input to alter and adjust the gaming environment, such as lighting, music, colors, complexity, or level of companionship; (3) an avatar in a virtual world can mirror a human’s affective expressions and become more believable, likable, trustable, and enjoyable; and, (4) a healthcare application can provide empathetic interventions and motivational support to offer assistance and empower patients to improve their quality of life. The key questions to be answered include: What data is used? What pre-processing is needed? What models would be best for each type of data? How can diverse channels be fused? And, what are the challenges for training and testing models?

Slides

This are my slides from the presentation

Videos

Neuromarketing – measurement of physiological and neural signals to gain insight into customers’ motivations, preferences, and decisions

Affective Avatar – explores the affective potential of virtual humans that signal an emotional state through BCI and physiological sensors and communicate an identity through appearance customization and body posture.

Affective Pacman – Provides affect-driven adaptive capabilities to the well-known game, Pac- Man. The game changes driven by affective states aim to improve the user experience by keeping or increasing player’s engagement.

Lost in the Dark – Provides affect-driven adaptive capabilities to the well-known game, Pac- Man. The game changes driven by affective states aim to improve the user experience by keeping or increasing player’s engagement.

Emotion Recognition in Virtual Reality – A virtual environment designed to emulate social interaction and improve mood.