South-East European Research Centre (SEERC)

Affective Computing (AC) is the scientific discipline that is concerned with emotional interactions performed with and through computers. Since its appearance, more than a decade ago, AC has been under constant improvement with continuous emergence of methods for emotion recognition/synthesis, within the main emotion-carrier channels (speech, facial expressions, body gestures, internal physiology). The goal of this talk is to present the state in-the-art in affective computing and the key domains worth investigating, with particular focus on the recent work on intelligent human-like affective communication based on appraisal theories of emotions. According to this view, emotions are perceived as an outcome of the organism's appraisal on the external event or stimuli and the significance of that event for the organism (and its well being). The appraisal theory aims to describe the complex cognitive aspects of emotion, which are not tackled by the other approaches, such as dimensional or discrete theory of emotions. The principal goal of the PhD work is to develop a computational model of appraisal processes, and emotion representation, in combination with virtual characters and affective speech synthesiser. The products of the research are applicable in areas such as virtual reality, collaborative networks, medical informatics, technology-enhanced learning and many others.