Affective computing is the understanding, the recognition and the inclusion of human emotions in the design of computational systems. Therefore, affective computing aims at developing devices and whole frameworks accounting for users’ affective reactions or states, so as to ease human-computer and human-human interaction. In this talk we will first briefly overview the main research projects in this area that are conducted at the Computer Vision and Multimedia Laboratory: emotions assessment for affective computing; affective tagging based on physiological signals, on crowdsourcing, and on fusion with behavioral signals; flow and engagement for affective gaming and learning; situated ecological affect estimation, in city buses for passenger comfort assessment, and in movie theaters for film highlights detection.
We will then present the EATMINT project investigating the impact of mutual emotion awareness in mediated interaction and remote cooperation. In this work we address the following research questions: (1) what is the impact of emotion awareness on mutual modeling, grounding, transactivity and other collaborative processes? (2) how to automatically assess emotions in this context? (3) how to develop a collaborative “emotionally aware” system and what are the benefits on the collaboration process? As will be discussed, the main result so far is that the EATMINT manual emotion awareness tools does have a positive effect on collaborative processes, such as on mutual modeling of emotions and on transactivity.

Short Biography
Thierry Pun is full professor at the University of Geneva, head of the Computer Vision and Multimedia Laboratory (CVML) and of the Multimodal Interaction Group (MMI). His current research interests are in affective computing and emotions analysis, social signal processing and multimodal interaction. He is involved in projects concerning affective computing and gaming, physiological signals analysis for emotion assessment and social interactions analysis, multimodal interfaces for blind and elderly users, brain-computer interaction. Thierry Pun has authored or co-authored over 300 full papers as well as eight patents (http://scholar.google.ch/citations?user=sR12P9MAAAAJ&hl=fr). He was one of the general chairs and organizers of ACII 2013 (Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction) in Geneva, Switzerland, September 2-5, 2013 (http://acii2013.org). Prof. Pun has been instrumental in the creation of two spin-offs of the University of Geneva, and has participated in and/or lead a number of research projects, Swiss and European, financed by public and private entities.