The Google awards program supports academic research aimed at improving information access.

Dr Mascolo’s research is in the area of Social Networks, while Dr Bulling researches Human Computer Interaction.

The Computer Laboratory team have joined forces with the Darwin Correspondence Project, based at Cambridge University Library, and Autism Research Centre as part of the Festival of Ideas , the UK’s only festival for the arts, humanities and social sciences.

Using 21st century techniques to study the same problems Darwin grappled with during March and November 1868 as he worked on his book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Saturday’s experiment will use the same photographs Darwin used nearly 150 years ago.  After tomorrow, anyone will be able to take part online, through the Darwin Correspondence Project’s website, at http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/emotions/.

The test follows the format of one devised by Laurel Riek, Marwa Mahmoud and Tadas Baltrušaitis in the Computer Laboratory which invites participants around the world to watch videos on their home computers and classify their emotional content, drawing on their database of words describing emotions.

The Computer Laboratory work, led by Professor Peter Robinson, is looking at the development of socially and emotionally adept technologies. Emotionally intelligent interfaces, such as the ones being worked at Cambridge, are able to understand our emotions and react to them. The project is investigating the inference of people’s mental states from facial expressions, vocal nuances, body posture and gesture – and also considering the expression of emotions by robots and cartoon avatars.

See http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/emotions/ for more information about research into affective computing in the Computer Laboratory.

Dan completed his PhD under the supervision of Dr Simon Moore.

Tadas presented a paper on “Modeling Latent Discriminative Dynamic of Multi-Dimensional Affective Signals” at the fourth International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction in Memphis this week, reporting on a system that won the video sub-challenge in the competition.

The Audio-Visual Emotion Challenge (AVEC 2011) was the first competition event aimed at comparison of automatic audio, visual and audiovisual emotion analysis. The goal of the challenge was to provide a common benchmark test set for individual multimodal information processing and to bring together the audio and video emotion recognition communities, to compare the relative merits of the two approaches to emotion recognition under well-defined and strictly comparable conditions and establish to what extent fusion of the approaches is possible and beneficial. A further motivation was the need to advance emotion recognition systems to be able to deal with naturalistic behaviour in large volumes of un-segmented, non-prototypical and non-preselected data as this is exactly the type of data that both multimedia retrieval and human-machine/human-robot communication interfaces have to face in the real world.

See http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/rainbow/emotions/ for more information about research into affective computing in the Computer Laboratory.