Tracing emotion: an overview

Computational research with continuous representations depends on obtaining continuous representations from human labellers. The main method used for that purpose is tracing. Tracing raises a range of challenging issues, both psychological and statistical. Naive assumptions about these issues are easy to make, and can lead to inappropriate requirements and uses. The natural function of traces is to capture perceived affect, and as such they belong in long traditions of research on both perception and emotion. Experiments on several types of material provide information about their characteristics, particularly the ratings on which people tend to agree. Disagreement is not necessarily a problem in the technique. It may correctly show that people’s impressions of emotion diverge more than commonly thought. A new system, Gtrace, is designed to let rating studies capitalise on a decade of experience and address the research questions that are opened up by the data now available.

Smiling Virtual Characters Corpora

To create smiling virtual characters, the different morphological and dynamic characteristics of the virtual characters smiles and the impact of the virtual characters smiling behavior on the users need to be identified. For this purpose, we have collected two corpora: one directly created by users and the other resulting from the interaction between virtual characters and users. We present in details these two corpora in the article.

Keeping it real! Enhancing realism in standardised patient OSCE stations

Background: Objective structured clinical examinations (OSCEs) are a
commonly used method of assessing clinical competency in healthcare education. They can providean opportunity to observe candidates interacting with patients.
There are many challenges in using real patients in OSCEs, and increasingly standardised patients are being used as a preference. However, by using standardised patients there is a risk of making the encounter arti?cial and removed from actual clinical practice.
Context: Efforts made in terms of cognitive, auditory, visual, tactile, psychological and emotional cues can minimise the differences between a simulated
and real clinical scenario. However, a number of factors, including feasibility, cost and usability, need to be considered if such techniques are to be practicable
within an OSCE framework.
Innovation: This article describes a series of techniques that have been used in our institution to enhance the realism of a standardised patient encounter in an
OSCE. Efforts in preparing standardised patient roles, and how they portray these roles, will be considered. A wide variety of equipment can also be used in
combination with a patient and the surrounding environment, which can further enhance the authenticity of the simulated scenario.
Implications: By enhancing the realism in simulated patient OSCE encounters, there is potential to trigger more authentic conscious responses from candidates and implicit reactions that the candidates themselves may be less
aware of. Furthermore, using such techniques may allow faculty members to select scenarios that were previously not thought possible in an OSCE

Do different 'magnocellular tasks' probe the same neural substrate?

The sensory abnormalities associated with disorders such as dyslexia, autism and schizophrenia have often been attributed to a generalized deficit in the visual magnocellular-dorsal stream and its auditory homologue. To probe magnocellular function, various psychophysical tasks are often employed that require the processing of rapidly changing stimuli. But is performance on these several tasks supported by a common substrate? To answer this question, we tested a cohort of 1060 individuals on four 'magnocellular tasks': detection of low-spatial-frequency gratings reversing in contrast at a high temporal frequency (so-called frequency-doubled gratings); detection of pulsed low-spatial-frequency gratings on a steady luminance pedestal; detection of coherent motion; and auditory discrimination of temporal order. Although all tasks showed test-retest reliability, only one pair shared more than 4 per cent of variance. Correlations within the set of 'magnocellular tasks' were similar to the correlations between those tasks and a 'non-magnocellular task', and there was little consistency between 'magnocellular deficit' groups comprising individuals with the lowest sensitivity for each task. Our results suggest that different 'magnocellular tasks' reflect different sources of variance, and thus are not general measures of 'magnocellular function'.

Understanding the Behaviour of PET in Stretch Blow Moulding

This paper is concerned with understanding the behaviour of Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) in the injection stretch blow moulding (ISBM) process where it is typically bi-axially stretched to form bottles for the packaging industry. Preforms which have been pre sprayed with a pattern and heated in an oil bath have been stretched and blown in free air using a lab scale ISBM machine whilst being monitored via high speed video. The images have subsequently been analysed using a digital image correlation system (VIC 3D). Results are presented showing the typical deformation modes and strain rates encountered in the ISBM process.

Modelling and Instrumentation of Stretch Blow Moulding

The injection stretch blow moulding process is used to manufacture PET containers used in the soft drinks and carbonated soft drinks industry. The process consists of a test tube like specimen known as a preform which is heated, stretch and blown into a mould to form the container. This research is focused on developing a validated simulation of the process thus enabling manufacturers to design their products in a virtual environment without the need to waste time, material and energy. The simulation has been developed using the commercial FEA package Abaqus and has been validated using state of the art data acquisition system consisting of measurements for preform temperature (inner and outer wall) using a device known as THERMOscan (Figure 1), stretch rod force and velocity, internal pressure and air temperature inside the preform using an instrumented stretch rod and the?exact?timing of when the preform touches the mould wall using contact sensors.? In addition, validation studies have also been performed by blowing a perform without a mould and using high sped imaging technology in cooperation with an advanced digital image correlation system (VIC 3D) to provided new quantitative information on the behaviour of PET during blowing.? The approach has resulted in a realistic simulation in terms of accurate input parameters, preform shape evolution and prediction of final properties.

AVEC 2011–The First International Audio/Visual Emotion Challenge

The Audio/Visual Emotion Challenge and Workshop (AVEC 2011) is the first competition event aimed at comparison of multimedia processing and machine learning methods for automatic audio, visual and audiovisual emotion analysis, with all participants competing under strictly the same conditions. This paper first describes the challenge participation conditions. Next follows the data used – the SEMAINE corpus – and its partitioning into train, development, and test partitions for the challenge with labelling in four dimensions, namely activity, expectation, power, and valence. Further, audio and video baseline features are introduced as well as baseline results that use these features for the three sub-challenges of audio, video, and audiovisual emotion recognition.

Evaluation of Four Designed Virtual Agent Personalities

Convincing conversational agents require a coherent set of behavioral responses that can be interpreted by a human observer as indicative of a personality. This paper discusses the continued development and subsequent evaluation of virtual agents based on sound psychological principles. We use Eysenck's theoretical basis to explain aspects of the characterization of our agents, and we describe an architecture where personality affects the agent's global behavior quality as well as their back-channel productions. Drawing on psychological research, we evaluate perception of our agents' personalities and credibility by human viewers (N = 187). Our results suggest that we succeeded in validating theoretically grounded indicators of personality in our virtual agents, and that it is feasible to place our characters on Eysenck's scales. A key finding is that the presence of behavioral characteristics reinforces the prescribed personality profiles that are already emerging from the still images. Our long-term goal is to enhance agents' ability to sustain realistic interaction with human users, and we discuss how this preliminary work may be further developed to include more systematic variation of Eysenck's personality scales. © 2012 IEEE.


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