Affective computing

The “affective computing” focus has the objective to promote the use of computers and computerized models of emotions in the study of affect.

Affective computing is a recent topic in computer science that mainly aims at creating emotionally intelligent systems (i.e. softwares, robots, cars, …) which are able to detect and synthetize emotional reactions. Such interfaces would thus be able to adapt to the emotional state of the user and facilitate emotional communication. Affective computing has now established itself as a strongly interdisciplinary research field encompassing psychologists and computer scientists.

The affective computing focus regroups members of the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences to work on the following activities:

• the development of new affective computer interfaces able to understand and react to users emotional states,
• the computational implementation and test of psychological emotional models,
• the acquisition of multimodal and complex affective data corpus in ecological situations,
• the search for innovative applications of affective computing,
• the organization of events on these topics.

In the context of the NCCR, affective computing is essential to strengthen the research and dissemination activities of affective science researchers:

• it can stimulate new statistical analysis methodologies such as pattern recognition and multimodal signal processing;
• affective computing also plays a major role in the appraisal modeling of emotions: while psychologists design appraisal-based models, their implementation in the machine is not only an ideal way of evaluating models efficiency and realism, but also to quickly correct and refine a model.
• due to the applied nature of affective computing, the focus can contribute to actively disseminate the research of the NCCR trough interactive demonstrations, the establishment of links with the industry, and stimulations of the development of innovative applications.

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