HCI2003: New Research into Emotion shouts "Look At Me!"

The "Look At Me" session at the recent British HCI Group's HCI 2003 conference in Bath provided some sharp insights into aspects of affective computing and indeed eight-year olds! Facial expressions were a common theme this year and the presenters faced a lively, knowledgeable and appreciative audience.

Zhe Xu from Bournemouth University introduced us to the second phase of his research work on emotional systems. Last year he built a text to emotion engine using emotional tagging, and this year he presented his image warping and morphing solution to the problem of providing personalised facial expressions to track the tagged emotion. Taking one neutral facial picture and then applying transformations produced some very acceptable representations of Ekman's six emotion taxonomy in three degrees of severity for each. Robert Ward from the University of Huddersfield then showed how he used commercial face tracking software to do the reverse: recognising the emotions from real-time video of participants under staged stimuli. Using a good experimental technique the conclusion that this use of face tracking software is of value to affective computing research appears well justified.

These full papers were followed by short ones from Kate Hone and Tangming Yuan. Kate, from Brunel University, described how she had corroborated previous work showing that a text based agent could be effective as a frustration relieving intervention for users. This was followed by assessing the use of an embodied agent for the same purpose and concluding that this was superior to the text only case. This contrasts with my own assessment of agents such as the Microsoft paperclip and so we look forward to future work with the facial recognition techniques that Robert is pioneering!

In final paper Tangming of Leeds Metropolitan University examined a refined computer debate dialogue model and corresponding tutor environment. Whilst some required refinements were identifed, this looked like a great piece of technology for improving those transferable skills in the area of logic and debate which I would have been delighted to use during my sojourn in academia. It would be interesting to see how this sits alongside projects such as the Knowledge Management Institute's D3E: the combination could provide a very rounded environment for knowledge workers such as my own development team.

One thought that I took away from the session is the generic nature of much of this work, allowing it to be applied not only to the work domain, but also to leisure and entertainment. We look forward to the return of Andrew Monk's "Computers and Fun" to remind us of the breadth that HCI needs to maintain and embrace to ensure a prosperous future.

Adrian Williamson
Development Graham Technology plc
Session Chair - Emotions and Computers

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