CADIA seminar: Affective Body Expression: Perception and Automatic Recognition
CADIA Seminar Thursday at 12:10.
Title: Affective Body Expression: Perception and Automatic Recognition
Speaker: Nadia Berthouze, Professor in Affecitve Computing and Interaction at UCL
Location: Room M120
Recent years have seen the emergence of technology that involves, requires and allows its users to be engaged through their body. This has made it possible to better exploit and understand this modality to capture, respond to and regulate users' affective experience. Through different studies and contexts, spanning from computer games to textile handling, I will present our current understanding of how people perceive and express affect through body movement and touch behaviour. In doing so, I will also present our work on automatic recognition of naturalistic affective expressions and on how technology can be used to regulate people's affective states and perception of themselves.
The Speaker: Nadia Berthouze is Professor in Affective Computing and Interaction. Her main area of expertise is the study of body posture/movement as a modality for recognising, modulating and measuring human affective states in HCI. She has published more than170 papers in affective computing, HCI, and pattern recognition. She was awarded the 2003 Technical Prize from the Japanese Society of Kansei Engineering.
She is and has been the PI on a multitude of EU funded projects including the EU-FP7 Marie Curie IRSES UBI-HEALTH: Exchange of Excellence in Ubiquitous Computing Technologies to Address Healthcare Challenges and the H2020 HUMAN Manufacturing Project.The premise of her research is that affect, emotion, and subjective experience should be factored into the design of interactive technology. Indeed, for technology to be truly effective in our social network, it should be able to adapt to the affective needs of each user group or even each individual.
The aim of her research is to create systems/software that can sense the affective state of their users and use that information to tailor the interaction process. Body movement and touch behaviour are major medium for this goal: they support cognitive processes, regulates emotions, and mediates affective and social communication. She is currently pursuing three lines of research looking at these modalities as channels to induce, recognize and measure the quality of experience of humans and in particularly of humans interacting and engaging through/with technology in various domains including physical rehabilitation.In the context of physical rehabilitation, she is investigates how multisensing and multimodal technology can help overcome the psychological barriers to remain physically active and re-engage with one's own body.
