All News (September 2012 - present)

Jan 2023 - Our paper Towards Causal Replay for Knowledge Rehearsal in Continual Learning has been accepted for oral presenation at AAAI'23 Bridge Program.

Jan 2023 - Our paper Learning Person-specific Cognition from Facial Reactions for Automatic Personality Recognition is now available online in IEEE Trans. on Affective Computing.

Jan 2023 - Our paper Robotic Mental Well-being Coaches for the Workplace: An In-the-Wild Study on Form has been accepted as a full paper at 2023 ACM/IEEE Int'l Conference on Human-Robot Interaction.

Jan 2023 - Our paper Robotic Coaches Delivering Group Mindfulness Practice at a Public Cafe has been accepted for presenation as LBR at ACM/IEEE HRI 2023 Conference.

Jan 2023 - We are organising LEAP-HRI 2023 Workshop on Lifelong Learning and Personalization in Long-Term Human-Robot Interaction as a third edition at 2023 ACM/IEEE HRI. Submit your papers by Jan 22 (early)/ Feb 19.

Jan 2023 - Our paper Adaptive Robotic Mental Well-being Coaches has been accepted for presenation at ACM/IEEE HRI Pioneers'23Workshop.

Dec 2022 - Our paper Causal Structure Learning of Bias for Fair Affect Recognition will be presented at IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV 2023) Workshop on Demographic Variations in Performance of Biometrics and Related Technology ( DVBPA 2023) in January 2023.

Dec 2022 - Our paper Dataset Bias in Deception Detection is now available online as part of ICPR'22 Proceedings.

Nov 2022 - Trinity Hall has interviewed me on my research and being a Fellow of the college. Here is the piece titled Robots, emotions and us.

Nov 2022 - Our paper Computational Audio Modelling for Robot-Assisted Assessment of Children’s Mental Wellbeing will be presented ICSR 2022 in December 2022.

Nov 2022 - Our review paper Measuring Mental Wellbeing of Children via Human-Robot Interaction: Challenges and Opportunities will appear in Interaction Studies Journal.

Oct 2022 - Our paper Latent Generative Replay for Resource-Efficient Continual Learning of Facial Expressions will be presented at IEEE FG 2023 and its pre-print is available here.

Oct 2022 - Our collaborative paper Reproducibility in Human-Robot Interaction: Furthering the Science of HRI is now available online in Current Robotics Reports.

Oct 2022 - Our paper Counterfactual Fairness for Facial Expression Recognition was presented at WCPA'22 the 1st Int'l Workshop and Challenge on People Analysis organised at ECCV 2022 and its pre-print is available here.

Oct 2022 - Our paper Deep Learning-based Assessment of Facial Periodic Affect in Work-like Settings was presented at WCPA'22 the 1st Int'l Workshop and Challenge on People Analysis organised at ECCV 2022 and its pre-print is available here.

Oct 2022 - Our paper Continual Learning for Affective Robotics: A Proof of Concept for Wellbeing will appear in ACII 2022 Workshop Proceedings and its pre-print is available here.

Oct 2022 - Our paper Affective Robotics For Wellbeing: A Scoping Review will appear in ACII 2022 Workshop Proceedings and its pre-print is available here.

Oct 2022 - Our paper Computational Recognition of Facial Expressions in Sculpture will appear in ACII 2022 Workshop Proceedings and its pre-print is available here.

Aug 2022 - Our work investigating Whether Robots Can Help in the Evaluation of Mental Wellbeing in Children received over 1,000 media reports worldwide!

Aug 2022 - Our paper Can Robots Help in the Evaluation of Mental Wellbeing in Children? An Empirical Study was presented at IEEE RO-MAN'22.

Aug 2022 - I gave a keynote talk titled Robotic Coaches for Mental Wellbeing: From User Requirements to AI-driven Adaptation at BAILAR 2022.

Aug 2022 - I gave a keynote talk titled Artificial Emotional Intelligence: Quo Vadis? at ICPR 2022.

Aug 2022 - I gave a keynote talk titled It Doesn't Work Like That! Lessons Learned in Situated Affective Computing at 3rd Workshop on Applied Multimodal Affect Recognition (AMAR 2022).

June 2022 - Our paper The landscape of facial processing applications in the context of the European AI Act and the development of trustworthy systems is published and openly available in Nature Scientific Reports.

June 2022 - I gave a Friday Discourse on Creating Emotionally Intelligent Technology at the Royal Institution.

June 2022 - Our paper Domain-Incremental Continual Learning for Mitigating Bias in Facial Expression and Action Unit Recognition is availble online on IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing.

May 2022 - Our paper Dataset Bias in Deception Detection has been accepted at ICPR'22.

May 2022 - Our paper Learning Multi-dimensional Edge Feature-based AU Relation Graph for Facial Action Unit Recognition has been accepted at IJCAI'22.

Apr 2022 - On April 9th the Affective Intelligence and Robotics Lab ( AFAR Lab) gave live demo to the public as part of the 2022 Cambridge Festival.

Apr 2022 - I have been interviewed about our research work on robotic wellbeing coaches for Speaker Spotlight of Cambridge Festival 2022.

Mar 2022 - I gave an invited talk on Fairness, Explainability, and Facial Affect at the AAAI 2022 Workshop on Human-Centric Self-supervised Learning (HCSSL'22).

Mar 2022 - Our paper Mind Your Manners! A Dataset and a Continual Learning Approach for Assessing Social Appropriateness of Robot Actions is avaiable at Front. Robot. AI. Access the code here.

Feb 2022 - Our paper Statistical, Spectral and Graph Representations for Video-based Facial Expression Recognition in Children has been accepted at IEEE ICASSP'22.

Feb 2022 - Our paper Affect-Driven Learning of Robot Behaviour for Collaborative Human-Robot Interactions is avaiable at Front. Robot. AI.

Jan 2022 - Our paper Learning Socially Appropriate Robo-waiter Behaviours through Real-time User Feedback has been accepted as a full paper at ACM/IEEE HRI'22.

Dec 2021 - Our paper AULA-Caps: Lifecycle-Aware Capsule Networks for Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Facial Actions appeared as an oral presentation at IEEE FG 2021.

Oct 2021 - Our paper Personality Recognition by Modelling Person-specific Cognitive Processes using Graph Representation appeared as an oral presentation at ACM Multimedia 2021.

Oct 2021 - I gave a keynote talk on Data-driven Robot Social Intelligence at the ACM ICMI 2021 Workshop on Generation and Evaluation of Non-verbal Behaviour for Embodied Agents (GENEA).

Oct 2021 - I took part in the panel discussion on Social Signals and Multimedia: Past, Present, Future at ACM Multimedia 2021.

Oct 2021 - I gave an invited talk on Inference of Affect and Personality in Multi-person Settings at DYAD@ICCV2021, the Workshop on Understanding Social Behavior in Dyadic and Small Group Interactions at ICCV 2021.

Sep 2021 - I have been awarded the Distinguished PC Award at IJCAI'21 as one of the 20 Distinguished PCs from a total of 1940!

Sep 2021 - A blog post about our research on creating robotic wellbeing coaches was published on the University of Cambridge website in May 2021. By now it has reached a staggering 45,000 readers!

Aug 2021 - Our paper Creating a Robot Coach for Mindfulness and Wellbeing: A Longitudinal Study was a Finalist for RSJ/KROS Distinguished Interdisciplinary Research Award at IEEE RO-MAN 2021. You can request the pre-print version here.

Aug 2021 - Our paper Participatory Design of a Robotic Mental Well-being Coach was presented at IEEE RO-MAN 2021. You can request the pre-print version here.

Aug 2021 - I gave an invited talk at SCRITA, the 4th Workshop on Trust, Acceptance and Social Cues in Human-Robot Interaction at IEEE RO-MAN 2021 titled Will Artificial Social Intelligence Lead to Trust and Acceptance in HRI?

July 2021 - Our paper Multi-dimensional Affect in Poetry (POCA) Dataset: Acquisition, Annotation and Baseline Results will be presented at ACII 2021 in October 2021. You can request the pre-print version here.

June 2021 - I gave an invited talk titled Continual Learning for Affective Robotics at the CVPR 2021 Workshop on Continual Learning on 25 June 2021. You can watch the recording here and access the slides here.

Mar 2021 - I gave an invited talk on Data-driven Artificial Social Intelligence: From Social Appropriateness to Fairness as part of the Cambridge Neuroscience Interdisciplinary Seminar series. The recording is now available here.

Jan 2021 - We are organising a HRI 2021 Workshop on Lifelong Learning and Personalization in Long-Term Human-Robot Interaction (LEAP-HRI) . Submit your papers by Jan 25 (early)/ Feb 17.

Jan 2021 - We are Guest Editing a Frontiers in Robotics and AI Special Issue on Lifelong Learning and Long-term HRI. Submit your papers by Feb 19th.

Oct 2020 - Our paper Facial Electromyography-based Adaptive Virtual Reality Gaming for Cognitive Training , will be presented at ACM Int'l Conf. on Multimodal Interaction (ACM ICMI'20).

Oct 2020 - We are Guest Editing a Frontiers in Neuroergonomics Special Issue on Non-invasive neuroergonomic approaches for understanding user and teams in everyday contexts. Submit your abstracts by Nov 23rd.

Sep 2020 - Our paper Automatic Analysis of Facilitated Taste-liking will be presented at ACM ICMI'20 Workshop on Multisensory Approaches to Human-Food Interaction.

Sep 2020 - Our paper Bodily Expression of Social Initiation Behaviors in ASC and non-ASC children: Mixed Reality vs. LEGO Game Play will be presented at ACM ICMI'20 Workshop on Face and Gesture Analysis for Health Informatics.

Aug 2020 - Our paper Investigating Bias and Fairness in Facial Expression Recognition will be presented at ECCV'20 Workshop on Fair Face Recognition and Analysis.

Aug 2020 - Our paper Investigating Taste-liking with a Humanoid Robot Facilitator has been selected as a Best Paper Candidate at IEEE RO-MAN 2020.

July 2020 - Our paper Continual Learning for Affective Robotics: Why, What and How? is accepted for oral presentation at IEEE RO-MAN 2020.

June 2020 - Our IEEE FG 2020 paper CLIFER: Continual Learning with Imagination for Facial Expression Recognition is now available online.

May 2020 - We are organising a Workshop on Lifelong Learning for Long-term HRI at IEEE RO-MAN 2020. Submission deadline is July 20th.

Feb 2020 - Our IEEE Trans. Cybernetics paper Audio-driven Robot Upper-body Motion Synthesis is now available online.

Feb 2020 - The Frontiers E-book comprising all the articles featured in our Research Topic on Affective and Social Signals for HRI is now available online.

Jan 2020 - A pre-print of our paper Culture-Based Explainable Human-Agent Deconfliction is now available online.

Oct 2019 - I gave an invited lecture on Affect and Personality Analysis in Human-Human/-Robot Interaction Settings at the Dagstuhl Seminar on Social Agents for Teamwork and Group Interactions.

Oct 2019 - I was part of a panel discussion on What Makes Us Human in the Age of AI in the 2019 Festival of Ideas.

June 2019 - I gave an invited lecture on Artificial Emotional Intelligence for Human-Robot Interaction at the Centre for Historical Analysis and Conflict Research, in the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst.

June 2019 - Our paper titled Alone vs In-a-group: A Multi-modal Framework for Automatic Affect Recognition has been published in ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications.

May 2019 - I gave an invited keynote talk titled Creating Technology with Socio-emotional Intelligence at IEEE FG 2019, the 14th IEEE Int'l Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition, held in Lille, France.

May 2019 - Our paper titled Your Fellows Matter: Affect Analysis across Subjects in Group Videos has been published in the Proceedings of IEEE FG'19.

May 2019 - I gave an invited keynote talk titled From one to many: Affect analysis in multi-person settings at FG 2019 Workshop on Empathy Modelling in Real-World Scenarios in Lille, France.

Apr 2019 - I am the Program Co-chair of IEEE/ACM HRI 2020, 15th ACM/IEEE Int'l Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, that will be taking place in Cambridge, UK.

Mar 2019 - Our paper titled Live human–robot interactive public demonstrations with automatic emotion and personality prediction is now available online in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B's special issue From social brains to social robots.

Feb 2019 - Our paper titled Registration-free Face-SSD: Single shot analysis of smiles, facial attributes, and affect in the wild appears in May 2019 Issue of Computer Vision and Image Understanding Journal.

Jan 2019 - Our paper titled A Deep Generic to Specific Recognition Model for Group Membership Analysis using Non-verbal Cues has been published in Jan 2019 Issue of Image and Vision Computing Journal.

Oct 2018 - I have been interviewed for issue 85 of the CAM Magazine on creating charismatic robots.

Oct 2018 - I was part of a panel discussion on the Future of Work in the 2018 Festival of Ideas talking about the impact of the humanoid robots.

Aug 2018 - I have been invited to become a member of the EPSRC Peer Review College.

Aug 2018 - Our Research Topic has been selected as one of the 2018 Frontiers Spotlight Award Finalists!

Aug 2018 - I have been appointed a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute. Looking forward to spending some time there interacting with various interest groups from April 2019!

Jul 2018 - Our paper titled Detecting Deception and Suspicion in Dyadic Game Interactions has been accepted to be presented at ACM ICMI 2018- the ACM Int'l Conf. on Multimodal Interaction.

Jul 2018 - We have now made the Multimodal Human-Human-Robot Interactions (MHHRI) Dataset available to the research community. The dataset can be accessed here and the 2017 IEEE Trans. Affective Computing paper can be found here.

Jul 2018 - I am the General Co-Chair of the 8th Int'l Conference in Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction - ACII 2019. We will be hosting it in Cambridge in Sep 3-6, 2019. Please check the website on how to participate / more info!

Jul 2018 - I gave the Horizon Lecture on Human-like Robots for the Cambridge Construction Engineering Masters Programme.

June 2018 - I was a speaker at the Cambridge in the City event taking place at the London Guildhall, talking about new technology and its implications for the future of finance and society .

June 2018 - I gave an invited talk at the Hay Festival 2018 titled Demistifying The Social Robot.

May 2018 - I gave an invited talk at the Cambridge Pint of Science Festival titled Creating Technology with Socio-emotional Intelligence.

May 2018 - See the article Evolving with the robots about my invited talk at the Cambridge Series at the Hay Festival 2018.

May 2018 - Our book chapter titled Computational Analysis of Affect, Personality and Engagement for Human-Robot Interactions is now available online as part of the Elsevier's Computer Vision for Assistive Healthcare Book.

Apr 2018 - I gave a series of invited talks at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) , Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, on (1)Automatic Recognition of Affect from Face, (2)Interaction Design and (3)Disruptive Technologies for Wellbeing.

Feb 2018 - I gave an invited talk at Royal College of Art on Creating Technology with Socio-emotional Intelligence.

Feb 2018 - Our research has been featured in issue 35 of the Cambridge University magazine Research Horizons.

Oct 2017 - I gave an invited talk titled Towards Disruptive Technologies for Wellbeing: Explorations in Affective VR, Telepresence Robotics and Social Transference at MIT Media Lab.

Oct 2017 - Our paper titled Effects of Valence and Arousal on Working Memory Performance in Virtual Reality Gaming has been presented at ACII 2017 -Int'l Conf. on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction.

Oct 2017 - Our paper titled Computational Analysis of Valence and Arousal in Virtual Reality Gaming using Lower Arm Electromyograms has been presented at ACII 2017 -Int'l Conf. on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction.

Sep 2017 - I gave an invited talk titled Human Behaviour Analysis for Social Robotics at the BMVC'17 Workshop on Automatic Face Analytics for Human Behavior Understanding.

Aug 2017 - Our paper titled Comparing Social Science and Computer Science Workflow Processes for Studying Group Interactions is now available online in International Journal of Small Group Research.

Aug 2017 - Our paper titled Multimodal Human-Human-Robot Interactions (MHHRI) Dataset for Studying Personality and Engagement has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing.

Aug 2017 - Together with Ginevra Castellano and Bilge Mutlu, we are hosting a Research Topic on Affective and Social Signals for HRI in the Frontiers in Robotics and AI. Accepted papers are now online!

Aug 2017 - I gave an invited talk titled Analysis of Affect and Personality for Autonomous and Telepresence Robotics at the 2017 Workshop on The Emerging Social Neuroscience of Human-Robot Interaction at Bangor University.

Jul 2017 - Our PhD student Wenxuan Mou presented a live demo on Emotion Detection in Group Settings at the Robots for Resilient Infrastructure Challenge Event in Leeds.

Jul 2017 - I gave an invited talk titled Affect and Personality in Robots vs. Humans at the 2017 Conference of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence.

Jun 2017 - I gave an invited talk titled Affective and Social Signal Processing for Human-Computer-Robot Interactions in the Department of Information Technology at Uppsala University, Sweden.

Jun 2017 - Our paper titled Automatic Replication of Teleoperator Head Movements and Facial Expressions on a Humanoid Robot will be presented at IEEE RO-MAN 2017!

May 2017 - I gave a keynote talk titled Computational Analysis of Affect and Personality: From Empathic Architecture to Empathic Robots? at the 4TU.NIRICT Workshop on Empathic Technologies at the University of Twente, NL.

May 2017 - Our paper titled Personality Perception of Robot Avatar Tele-operators in Solo and Dyadic Tasks is now available in Frontiers in Robotics and AI - Humanoid Robotics.

Mar 2017 - I gave an invited talk titled Socio-emotional Human-Robot Interaction at the 2017 Cambridge Science Festival.

Feb 2017 - Our paper titled Learning Bases of Facial Activity is now available online in IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.

Feb 2017 - Our paper titled Robust Registration of Dynamic Facial Sequences is now available online in IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.

Feb 2017 - Our paper titled Biologically-Inspired Motion Encoding for Robust Global Motion Estimation is now available online in IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.

Jan 2017 - I am a Co-Program Chair of IEEE FG 2017 - the 12th IEEE Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition, that will be held from May 29 –June 3, 2017 in Washington, DC.

Nov 2016 - We were invited to take part in the Wellcome Collection's Friday Late Spectacular - Body Language Event on 4th of Nov 2016 with our live social robot demo called 'Teach Emo EQ'!

Oct 2016 - I gave the opening keynote titled Multimodal Analysis of Impressions and Personality in Human-Computer-Robot Interactions at the 6th International Workshop on Audio/Visual Emotion Challenge in Amsterdam.

Oct 2016 - Our paper titled Fully Automatic Analysis of Engagement and Its Relationship to Personality in Human-Robot Interactions is now available online in IEEE Access Journal.

Sep 2016 - Our EPSRC Being There Project had a massive public Showcase in Watershed, Bristol!

Aug 2016 - Our paper titled Personality Classification from Robot-mediated Communication Cues , was presented at IEEE RO-MAN 2016 - IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication. The paper reports on research we have been doing as part of the EPSRC Being There Project.

Feb 2016 - Our paper titled Personality Perception of Robot Avatar Tele-operators will be presented at HRI 2016 - ACM/IEEE Int'l Conference on Human-Robot Interaction.

Feb 2016 - Our paper titled Automatic Prediction of Impressions in Time and across Varying Context is now available on IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing. The paper reports on our latest findings of the EPSRC MAPTRAITS Project. Data, software and findings of the project can be found here.

Feb 2016 - I have been appointed as an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Multimedia.

Feb 2016 - I have been elected into the Executive Committee of Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing (AAAC).

Jan 2016 - I joined the Computer Laboratory at University of Cambridge as a Senior Lecturer.

Oct 2015 - We are giving a tutorial on Emotional and Social Signals for Multimedia Research as part of the ACM Multimedia 2015 Conference. Check the website for details.

Oct 2015 - We organised a Workshop on Designing and Evaluating Social Robots for Public Settings with Chris Bevan, Paul Bremner and Danaë Stanton Fraser in conjunction with IROS 2015, in Hamburg in Oct. 2015. All presented papers can be accessed here.

Jun 2015 - Our paper Emotional and Social Signals: A Neglected Frontier in Multimedia Computing? is now available online as part of IEEE Multimedia Magazine's Visions and Views section.

Mar 2015 - I have been appointed as an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing (TAC). See here if you would like to submit a manuscript to TAC.

May 2015 - Organising EmoSPACE 2015 - the 3rd Int'l Workshop on Emotion Representation, Analysis and Synthesis in Continuous Time and Space, conjunction with IEEE FG 2015, in Ljubljana on 4/8 May 2015.

Nov 2014 - Chapter titled Multimodal Affect Recognition for Naturalistic Human-Computer and Human-Robot Interactions is now available online.

Nov 2014 - Paper titled Automatic analysis of facial affect: A survey of registration, representation and recognition accepted by IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI) is available online.

Nov 2014 - EPSRC funded MAPTRAITS project website is now live. Check out the latest progress here.

Oct 2014 - Organising a Panel Discussion entitled Looking for emotional and social signals in multimedia: Where art thou? at ACM Multimedia'14 on November 4th, 2014 in Orlando!

May 2014 - Organising MAPTRAITS'14 -- Mapping Personality Traits Challenge and Workshop in conjunction with ACM ICMI'14 on 12 Nov. 2014. Challenge paper submission deadline is 25 Aug. 2014. Click here for details!

Feb 2015 - Emotional and Social Signals in Multimedia Area is now in its 2nd year as part of the ACM Multimedia Conference. Submission deadline for long/short papers is 31 March/30 April 2015.

Feb 2014 - Guest Editing the Special Issue of the ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (ACM TiiS) on Behavior Understanding for Arts and Entertainment. Submission deadline is March 26th, 2014.

Jan 2014 - Chairing the ICMI 2014 Multimodal Grand Challenge as part of the 16th ACM Int. Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2014). If you are interested in submitting a challenge proposal, deadline is January 15, 2014.

Nov 2014 - EPSRC funded Being There project website is now live. Check out the collaborating teams (Univ. of Exeter, Oxford, Bath, QMUL and Bristol Robotics Lab) and the latest progress here. See the QMUL press release here.

Oct 2014 - Featured as part of the QMUL Ada Lovelace Day Celebrations -- an annual celebration of the contributions of women to science, technology engineering, and mathematics.

Nov 2013 - Received funding worth £2M together with Universities of Exeter, Oxford, Bath, and Bristol Robotics Lab to work on the EPSRC Digital Personhood Project entitled Humans and Robots in Public Space. See the QMUL press release here.

Dec 2013 - Successfully hosted the second AC@UK 2013 event at QMUL this year (16 Dec. 2013).

Oct 2013 - The Proceedings of HBU 2013 , 4th Int'l Workshop on Human Behaviour Understanding: Interactions in Arts, Creativity, Entertainment and Edutainment that we are organising in conjunction with ACM Multimedia 2013 are now available online.

Aug 2013 - Here is a video of me talking about 'automatic affect analysis' recorded by Faculti.

June 2013 - The 2013 Intelligent Sensing Summer School we organised at QMUL (11-13 June 2013) was a great success!

Apr. 2013 - I am looking for a Post-Doc Researcher on automatic analysis of affective and social behaviour for my new EPSRC project. Details on the post and how to apply can be found on the official advert.

Apr. 2013 - We are organising EmoSPACE 2013 - the 2nd Int'l Workshop on Emotion Representation, Analysis and Synthesis in Continuous Time and Space, that will take place in conjunction with IEEE FG 2013, Apr. 22/26 2013, in Shanghai, China. See here for details.

Oct. 2012 - We recently gave a tutorial on Continuous Analysis of Emotions for Multimedia Applications at ACM Multimedia 2012.

Sep. 2012 - We are organising the Int'l Workshop on Affective Computing for Mobile HCI - AC4MobHCI 2012 that will take place in Sep. 17-18, 2012 in Istanbul, Turkey. The workshop will consist of invited talks from leading experts, as well as a Graduate Student Spotlight. See here for details.