Towards Emotional Interaction: Using Movies to Automatically Learn Users' Emotional States

The HCI community is actively seeking novel methodologies to gain insight into the user’s experience during interaction with both the application and the content. We propose an emotional recognition engine capable of automatically recognizing a set of human emotional states using psychophysiological measures of the autonomous nervous system, including galvanic skin response, respiration, and heart rate. A novel pattern recognition system, based on discriminant analysis and support vector machine classifiers is trained using movies’ scenes selected to induce emotions ranging from the positive to the negative valence dimension, including happiness, anger, disgust, sadness, and fear. In this paper we introduce an emotion recognition system and evaluate its accuracy by presenting the results of an experiment conducted with three physiologic sensors.

The Museum Of All: Institutional Communication Practices in a Participatory Networked World

The Museum Of All: Institutional Communication Practices in a Participatory Networked World

The host-tourist interaction in a world heritage site: the case of Guimarães

Guimarães, in the northwest of Portugal, is a city of strong symbolic and cultural significance and its nomination by UNESCO as world heritage, in 2001, enlarged its tourism potential. In this paper we present a few results of a survey that envisaged capturing the Guimarães residents’ perceptions of tourism impacts and their attitudes towards tourists. Specifically, one analyzes the type of relationship that exists between some socio-demographic groups and the perceived tourism impacts, as well as their socio-characteristics and the existing level of interaction between residents and tourists. The survey was implemented between January and March 2010 to a convenience sample of 540 inhabitants of the municipality of Guimarães resulting in 400 questionnaires with complete data. For this, we made use of various statistical techniques. Using a factorial analysis, we can conclude that the three factors used explain 52.3% of the variance contained in the original variables obtained from the survey. By another side, using a logit model in the analysis and taking as the dependent variable the frequent or very frequent contact with tourists, we found that only the variables referred to perceived positive impacts of tourism, education and the place of residence in urban areas have shown to be statistically significant. We are aware of the multiple ways the issue of residents’ perceptions and attitudes towards tourism can be approached and of the difficulties to get useful policy-oriented insights. This paper is a step in that trail.

The determinants of international equity investment: Do they differ between institutional and noninstitutional investors?

In this paper we investigate whether the determinants of international equity investment differ between investors with different degrees of sophistication. For this purpose, we analyse and compare the determinants of international equity investment of institutional and noninstitutional investors from 20 OECD countries (US not included) in the period 2001-2009. The results show that there are significant differences in the determinants of international equity investment between institutional and noninstitutional investors. In particular, noninstitutional investors tend to exhibit a more pronounced preference for equities of geographical nearby, contiguous and more transparent countries than institutional investors. The preference for more developed equity markets and the contrarian behaviour are also significantly more pronounced for noninstitutional than for institutional investors. These results support the argument that international equity investment of less sophisticated investors is more affected by information costs and familiarity than that of more sophisticated investors. Moreover, business cycles exert an influence on international equity investment decisions of both institutional and noninstitutional investors.