2009 Papers

Virtual Worlds such as Second Life provide unique opportunities to simulate real life scenarios and immerse the user in an environment that can be tailored to meet specific educational requirements. In these Immersive Learning Environments, students and faculty can interact from anywhere in the real world. From a general education perspective, they allow for virtual classrooms, virtual libraries, interactive role-playing, remote seminars, etc. From a medical education and science perspective, Immersive Learning Environments such as... Read more

Emotion plays an important role in human communication and therefore also human machine dialog systems can benefit from affective processing. We present in this paper an overview of our work from the past few years and discuss general considerations, potential applications and experiments that we did with the emotional classification of human machine dialogs. Anger in voice portals as well as problematic dialog situations can be detected to some degree, but the noise in real... Read more

The link between affect and student learning has been the subject of increasing attention. Because of the possible impacts of affective state on learning, it is a goal of many intelligent tutoring systems to attempt to control student emotional states through affective interventions. While much work has gone into improving the quality of these interventions, we are only beginning to understand the complexities of the relationships between affect, learning, and feedback. This paper investigates the... Read more

A model of multimodal sequential expressions of emotion for an Embodied Conversational Agent was developed. The model is based on video annotations and on descriptions found in the literature. A language has been derived to describe expressions of emotions as a sequence of facial and body movement signals. An evaluation study of our model is presented in this paper. Animations of 8 sequential expressions corresponding to the emotions - anger, anxiety, cheerfulness, embarrassment, panic fear,... Read more

For centuries artists have been exploring color to express emotions. Following this insight, the paper describes an approach to learn how to use color to influence the perception of emotions in virtual humans. First, a model of lighting and filters inspired on the visual arts is integrated with a virtual human platform to manipulate color. Next, an evolutionary model, based on genetic algorithms, is created to evolve mappings between emotions and lighting and filter parameters.... Read more

Robots and agents are becoming increasingly prominent in everyday life, taking on a variety of roles, including helpers, coaches, and even social companions. A core requirement for these social agents is the ability to establish and maintain long-term trusting and engaging relationship with their human users. Much research has already been done on the prerequisites for these types of social agents and robots, in affective computing, social computing and affective HCI. A number of disciplines... Read more

This paper investigates the impact of contradictory emotional content on people’s ability to identify the emotion expressed on avatar faces as compared to human faces. Participants saw emotional faces (human or avatar) coupled with emotional texts. The face and text could either display the same or different emotions. Participants were asked to identify the emotion on the face and in the text. While they correctly identified the emotion on human faces more often than on... Read more

The Arabic language presents researchers and developers of natural language processing (NLP) applications for Arabic text and speech with serious challenges. The purpose of this article is to describe some of these challenges and to present some solutions that would guide current and future practitioners in the field of Arabic natural language processing (ANLP). We begin with general features of the Arabic language in Sections 1, 2, and 3 and then we move to more... Read more

Virtual communities such as Second Life and Entropia Universe are quickly becoming the next frontier of cybercrime. With GDPs of virtual economies of persistent worlds approaching billions of dollars it is necessary to develop tools for protection of virtual environments similar to those utilized to secure real world’s infrastructure, such as biometrics security systems. The first step in the development of such security methodologies is wide availability of datasets necessary for training and... Read more

Research in user authentication has been a growing field in HCI. Previous studies have shown that peoples’ graphical memory can be used to increase password memorability. On the other hand, with the increasing number of devices with built-in motion sensors, kinesthetic memory (or muscle memory) can also be exploited for authentication. This paper presents a novel knowledge-based authentication scheme, called gesture password, which uses discrete gestures as password elements. The research presents a study of... Read more