14 September: Monday, September 19, 2011: Professor Anna Esposito on modalities
Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar: Index of September 2011 | Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar - Index of year: 2011 | Full index
Title:
The twinkle of emotional feeling: where it comes from?
Speaker:
Anna Esposito
Second University of Naples, Department of Psychology, and IIASS, Italy,
e.mail; iiass.annaesp@tin.it; anna.esposito@unina2.it;
Time & Venue:
11:00-12:00
Monday morning, September 19, 2011
Lloyd Building Basement -- LB01
Host:
The Centre for Computing and Language Studies/Computational Linguistics
Group, Trinity College Dublin
----------------------------
Abstract:
In a daily body-to-body interaction, emotional expressions play a
vital role in creating social linkages, producing cultural exchanges,
influencing relationships and communicating experiences. Emotional
information is transmitted and perceived simultaneously through verbal
(the semantic content of a message) and nonverbal (facial expressions,
vocal expressions, gestures, paralinguistic information) communicative
tools and contacts and interactions are highly affected by the way
this information is communicated/perceived by/from the
addresser/addressee. Therefore, research devoted to the understanding
of the relationship between verbal and non-verbal communication modes,
and to investigating the perceptual and cognitive processes involved
in the perception of emotional states, as well as the role played by
communication impairments in their recognition is particularly
relevant in the field of Human-Human and Human-Computer Interaction
both for build up and harden human relationships and for developing
friendly and emotionally colored assistive technologies.
A long research tradition has tended to investigate emotions and
related perceptual cues to infer them, through separate investigations
into the three fundamental expressive domains involved in their
communication, i.e. facial expressions, speech and body movements.
Whatever was the exploited domain, the data reported in literature
always referred to static facial expressions, static postures, that
contrast with vocal stimuli since they are naturally dynamic. In
addition, in daily experience, also emotional facial expressions and
gestures vary along time, since emotional states are intrinsically
dynamic processes.
In a cross cultural perspective, the results of many experiments
suggest the need of investigations on the role the multimodality might
play in communicating emotional feelings considering instantiated
forms of interactions since perception is a strongly non linear
process highly affected by the context, the culture, the medium and
the mode through which the emotion is expressed. The open questions
are:
Does multimodality increase our ability to felt and perceive
emotional feelings?
Is one channel (the voice for example) more powerful than another
(e.g. the visual one)?
Does cultural specificity have an effect on how emotional feeling is
perceived?
What is the role of language specificity in this context?
Biography:
Anna Esposito is currently Associate Professor in Computer Science at
the Department of Psychology, SUN, Caserta, IT; and Senior Researcher
at the International Institute for Advanced Scientific Studies
(IIASS), in Vietri sul Mare, Salerno, IT. She has been Research
Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at
Wright State University, Dayton, OH from 2000 to 2002 to which she is
currently research affiliate. She also is affiliated with the
University of Salerno, Department of Physics; and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT), RLE, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Anna joined her current Department on November 2002 where she teach
classes on Fundamentals of Computer Science and on Cognitive and
Algorithmic Issues of Multimodal Communication. At the University of
Salerno, Anna taught classes in Cybernetics, and at the IIASS she
taught classes on Neural Networks, Speech Processing, Information
Theory and Coding.
Anna current research interests are on the perceptual features of
verbal and nonverbal communication signals, and in particular on
cross-modal analysis of speech, gesture, and facial expression of
emotions. Further research interests are on language disorders, timing
in language, multimedia applications for disabled persons, and
modelling and applications of neural networks.
She is author of more than 100 publications on international journals,
books, and international conference proceedings, and editor of 14
international books.
CONTACT DETAILS: Prof. Anna Esposito
Associate Professor in Computer Science,
Affiliations:
Seconda Universitą di Napoli, Dipartimento di Psicologia, Via Vivaldi, 43, 81100 Caserta (Italy)
IIASS, Via Pellegrino 19, Vietri sul Mare (SA) Italy
e-mail: iiass.annaesp@tin.it; anna.esposito@unina2.it;
Ph: + 39 089 761167, + 39 0823 274797
Fax: + 39 089 761189
https://sites.google.com/site/annaesposito06/hom
Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar - Index of September 2011 | Index of year: 2011 | Full index