Principles And Applications Of Socio Cognitive And Affective Computing

Recent advances in socio-cognitive and affective computing require further study as countless benefits and opportunities have emerged from these innovative technologies that may be useful in a number of contexts throughout daily life. In order to ensure these technologies are appropriately utilized across sectors, the challenges and strategies for adoption as well as potential uses must be thoroughly considered. Principles and Applications of Socio-Cognitive and Affective Computing discusses several aspects of affective interactions and concepts in affective computing, the fundamentals of emotions, and emerging research and exciting techniques for bridging the emotional disparity between humans and machines, all within the context of interactions. The book also considers problem and solution guidelines emerging in cognitive computing, thus summarizing the roadmap of current machine computational intelligence techniques for affective computing. Covering a range of topics such as social interaction, robotics, and virtual reality, this reference work is crucial for scientists, engineers, industry professionals, academicians, researchers, scholars, practitioners, instructors, and students.

This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue "Socio-Cognitive and Affective Computing" that was published in Applied Sciences

"Social cognition focuses on how people process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations. It focuses on the role that cognitive processes play in our social interactions. On the other hand, the term cognitive computing is generally used to refer to new hardware and/or software that mimics the functioning of the human brain and helps to improve human decision-making. In this sense, it is a type of computing with the goal of discovering more accurate models of how the human brain/mind senses, reasons, and responds to stimuli. Thus, Socio-Cognitive Computing should be understood as a set of theoretical interdisciplinary frameworks, methodologies, methods and hardware/software tools to model how the human brain mediates social interactions. In addition, Affective Computing is the study and development of systems and devices that can recognize, interpret, process, and simulate human affects, a fundamental aspect of socio-cognitive neuroscience. It is an interdisciplinary field spanning computer science, electrical engineering, psychology, and cognitive science. Moreover, Physiological Computing is a category of technology in which electrophysiological data recorded directly from human activity are used to interface with a computing device. This technology becomes even more relevant when computing can be integrated pervasively in everyday life environments. Thus, Socio-Cognitive and Affective Computing systems should be able to adapt their behavior according to the Physiological Computing paradigm. This Special Issue on Socio-Cognitive and Affective Computing aimed at integrating these various albeit complementary fields. Proposals from researchers who use signals from the brain and/or body to infer people's intentions and psychological state in smart computing systems were welcome. Designing this kind of system requires combining knowledge and methods of ubiquitous and pervasive computing, as well as physiological data measurement and processing, with those of socio-cognitive and affective computing. Papers with a special focus on multidisciplinary approaches and multimodality were especially welcome"--Page 1.

Affective information processing assigns computers the human-like capabilities of observation, interpretation and generation of affect features. It is an important topic for harmonious human-computer interaction, by increasing the quality of human-computer communication and improving the intelligence of the computer. Discussing state of art of the research in affective information processing, this book summarises key technologies researched, such as facial expression recognition, face animation, emotional speech synthesis, intelligent agent, and virtual reality. The detailed discussion covers a wide range of topics including hot topics which look to challenge and improve current research work. Written to provide an opportunity for scientists, engineers and graduate students to learn problems, solutions and technologies in the topic area, this book will provide insight and prove a valuable reference tool.

Affective Computing is a growing multidisciplinary field encompassing computer science, engineering, psychology, education, neuroscience, and many other disciplines. It explores how affective factors influence interactions between humans and technology, how affect sensing and affect generation techniques can inform our understanding of human affect, and on the design, implementation, and evaluation of systems that intricately involve affect at their core. The Oxford Handbook of Affective Computing will help both new and experienced researchers identify trends, concepts, methodologies, and applications in this burgeouning field. The volume features 41 chapters divided into five main sections: history and theory, detection, generation, methodologies, and applications. Section One begins with a look at the makings of AC and a historical review of the science of emotion. Chapters discuss the theoretical underpinnings of AC from an interdisciplinary perspective involving the affective, cognitive, social, media, and brain sciences. Section Two focuses on affect detection or affect recognition, which is one of the most commonly investigated areas in AC. Section Three examines aspects of affect generation including the synthesis of emotion and its expression via facial features, speech, postures and gestures. Cultural issues in affect generation are also discussed. Section Four features chapters on methodological issues in AC research, including data collection techniques, multimodal affect databases, emotion representation formats, crowdsourcing techniques, machine learning approaches, affect elicitation techniques, useful AC tools, and ethical issues in AC. Finally, Section Five highlights existing and future applications of AC in domains such as formal and informal learning, games, robotics, virtual reality, autism research, healthcare, cyberpsychology, music, deception, reflective writing, and cyberpsychology. With chapters authored by world leaders in each area, The Oxford Handbook of Affective Computing is suitable for use as a textbook in undergraduate or graduate courses in AC, and will serve as a valuable resource for students, researchers, and practitioners across the globe.

Affective computing is a nascent field situated at the intersection of artificial intelligence with social and behavioral science. It studies how human emotions are perceived and expressed, which then informs the design of intelligent agents and systems that can either mimic this behavior to improve their intelligence or incorporate such knowledge to effectively understand and communicate with their human collaborators. Affective computing research has recently seen significant advances and is making a critical transformation from exploratory studies to real-world applications in the emerging research area known as applied affective computing. This book offers readers an overview of the state-of-the-art and emerging themes in affective computing, including a comprehensive review of the existing approaches to affective computing systems and social signal processing. It provides in-depth case studies of applied affective computing in various domains, such as social robotics and mental well-being. It also addresses ethical concerns related to affective computing and how to prevent misuse of the technology in research and applications. Further, this book identifies future directions for the field and summarizes a set of guidelines for developing next-generation affective computing systems that are effective, safe, and human-centered. For researchers and practitioners new to affective computing, this book will serve as an introduction to the field to help them in identifying new research topics or developing novel applications. For more experienced researchers and practitioners, the discussions in this book provide guidance for adopting a human-centered design and development approach to advance affective computing.

Affect and emotion play an important role in our everyday lives: They are present whatever we do, wherever we are, and wherever we go, without us being aware of them for much of the time. When it comes to interaction, be it with humans, technology, or humans via technology, we suddenly become more aware of emotion, either by seeing the other’s emotional expression, or by not getting an emotional response while anticipating one. Given this, it seems only sensible to explore affect and emotion in human-computer interaction, to investigate the underlying principles, to study the role they play, to develop methods to quantify them, and to finally build applications that make use of them. This is the research field for which, over ten years ago, Rosalind Picard coined the phrase "affective computing". The present book provides an account of the latest work on a variety of aspects related to affect and emotion in human-technology interaction. It covers theoretical issues, user experience and design aspects as well as sensing issues, and reports on a number of affective applications that have been developed in recent years.

Since interactions may occur between animals, humans, or computational agents, an interdisciplinary approach which investigates foundations of affective communication in a variety of platforms is indispensable. In the field of affective computing, a collection of research, merging decades of research on emotions in psychology, cognition and neuroscience will inspire creative future research projects and contribute to the prosperity of this emerging field. Affective Computing and Interaction: Psychological, Cognitive and Neuroscientific Perspectives examines the current state and the future prospects of affect in computing within the context of interactions. Uniting several aspects of affective interactions and topics in affective computing, this reference reviews basic foundations of emotions, furthers an understanding of the contribution of affect to our lives and concludes by revealing current trends and promising technologies for reducing the emotional gap between humans and machines, all within the context of interactions.