Emotion pervades human life in general, and human communication in particular, and this sets information technology a challenge. Traditionally, IT has focused on allowing people to accomplish practical tasks efficiently, setting emotion to one side. That was acceptable when technology was a small part of life, but as technology and life become increasingly interwoven we can no longer ask people to suspend their emotional nature and habits when they interact with technology. The European Commission funded a series of related research projects on emotion and computing, culminating in the HUMAINE project which brought together leading academic researchers from the many related disciplines. This book grew out of that project, and its chapters are arranged according to its working areas: theories and models; signals to signs; data and databases; emotion in interaction; emotion in cognition and action; persuasion and communication; usability; and ethics and good practice. The fundamental aim of the book is to offer researchers an overview of the related areas, sufficient for them to do credible work on affective or emotion-oriented computing. The book serves as an academically sound introduction to the range of disciplines involved – technical, empirical and conceptual – and will be of value to researchers in the areas of artificial intelligence, psychology, cognition and user—machine interaction.

The Affective Computing domain, term coined by Rosalind Picard in 1997, gathers several scientific areas such as computer science, cognitive science, psychology, design and art. The humane-machine interaction systems are no longer solely fast and efficient. They aim to offer to users affective experiences: user’s affective state is detected and considered within the interaction; the system displays affective state; it can reason about their implication to achieve a task or resolve a problem. In this book, we have chosen to cover various domains of research in emotion-oriented systems. Our aim is also to highlight the importance to base the computational model on theoretical foundations and on natural data.

In this treatment manual, Adele Lafrance, Katherine A. Henderson, and Shari Mayman provide mental health professionals with guidelines for implementing emotion-focused family therapy (EFFT), an exciting new intervention in which caregivers are the primary healing agents in their loved one's treatment. EFFT was initially created to treat eating disorders, and then developed into a transdiagnostic approach that can be applied to any emotion- or behavior-based disorder with various relationship dynamics across the lifespan, including parent-child relationships (even if the child is an adult) and romantic partnerships. The authors describe how to teach caregivers advanced skills for supporting their loved ones through emotion and behavior coaching. Therapists will also learn collaborative strategies for strengthening healing bonds between the caregiver and the loved one and healing relational ruptures. Techniques for processing caregivers' emotional blocks are also explored, as are methods for clinicians to work through their own blocks via supervision. Vivid case examples illustrate the implementation of EFFT in a wide variety of realistic scenarios. Clinical handouts are included in the appendices, which are also available under clinician and practitioner resources.

This book presents the methods, tools and techniques that are currently being used to recognise (automatically) the affect, emotion, personality and everything else beyond linguistics (‘paralinguistics’) expressed by or embedded in human speech and language. It is the first book to provide such a systematic survey of paralinguistics in speech and language processing. The technology described has evolved mainly from automatic speech and speaker recognition and processing, but also takes into account recent developments within speech signal processing, machine intelligence and data mining. Moreover, the book offers a hands-on approach by integrating actual data sets, software, and open-source utilities which will make the book invaluable as a teaching tool and similarly useful for those professionals already in the field. Key features: Provides an integrated presentation of basic research (in phonetics/linguistics and humanities) with state-of-the-art engineering approaches for speech signal processing and machine intelligence. Explains the history and state of the art of all of the sub-fields which contribute to the topic of computational paralinguistics. C overs the signal processing and machine learning aspects of the actual computational modelling of emotion and personality and explains the detection process from corpus collection to feature extraction and from model testing to system integration. Details aspects of real-world system integration including distribution, weakly supervised learning and confidence measures. Outlines machine learning approaches including static, dynamic and context‐sensitive algorithms for classification and regression. Includes a tutorial on freely available toolkits, such as the open-source ‘openEAR’ toolkit for emotion and affect recognition co-developed by one of the authors, and a listing of standard databases and feature sets used in the field to allow for immediate experimentation enabling the reader to build an emotion detection model on an existing corpus.

Recent technological advancements have deeply transformed society and the way people interact with each other. Instantaneous communication platforms have allowed connections with other people, forming global communities, and creating unprecedented opportunities in many sectors, making access to online resources more ubiquitous by reducing limitations imposed by geographical distance and temporal constrains. These technological developments bear ethically relevant consequences with their deployment, and legislations often lag behind such advancements. Because the appearance and deployment of these technologies happen much faster than legislative procedures, the way these technologies affect social interactions have profound ethical effects before any legislative regulation can be built, in order to prevent and mitigate those effects. Ethics in Online AI-Based Systems: Risks and Opportunities in Current Technological Trends features a series of reflections from experts in different fields on potential ethically relevant outcomes that upcoming technological advances could bring about in our society. Creating a space to explore the ethical relevance that technologies currently still under development could have constitutes an opportunity to better understand how these technologies could or should not be used in the future in order to maximize their ethically beneficial outcomes, while avoiding potential detrimental effects. Stimulating reflection and considerations with respect to the design, deployment and use of technology will help guide current and future technological advancements from an ethically informed position in order to ensure that, tomorrow, such advancements could contribute towards solving current global and social challenges that we, as a society, have today. This will not only be useful for researchers and professional engineers, but also for educators, policy makers, and ethicists. - Investigates how "intelligent" technological advances might be used, how they will affect social interactions, and what ethical consequences they might have for society - Identifies and reflects on questions that need to be asked before the design, deployment, and application of upcoming technological advancements, aiming to both prevent and mitigate potential risks, as well as to identify potentially ethically-beneficial opportunities - Recognizes the huge potential for ethically-relevant outcomes that technological advancements have, and take proactive steps to anticipate that they be designed from an ethically-informed position - Provides reflections that highlight the importance of the relationship between technology, their users and our society, thus encouraging informed design and educational and legislative approaches that take this relationship into account

Featuring selected contributions from the 2nd International Conference on Mechatronics and Robotics Engineering, held in Nice, France, February 18–19, 2016, this book introduces recent advances and state-of-the-art technologies in the field of advanced intelligent manufacturing. This systematic and carefully detailed collection provides a valuable reference source for mechanical engineering researchers who want to learn about the latest developments in advanced manufacturing and automation, readers from industry seeking potential solutions for their own applications, and those involved in the robotics and mechatronics industry.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the First International Conference on Physiological Computing Systems, PhyCS 2014, held in Lisbon, Portugal, in January 2014. The 10 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 52 submissions. They are organized in topical sections named: methodologies and methods; devices; applications; and human factors.