Unimodal Multi-Task Fusion for Emotional Mimicry Prediction

In this study, we propose a methodology for the Emotional Mimicry Intensity (EMI) Estimation task within the context of the 6th Workshop and Competition on Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild. Our approach leverages the Wav2Vec 2.0 framework, pre-trained on a comprehensive podcast dataset, to extract a broad range of audio features encompassing both linguistic and paralinguistic elements. We enhance feature representation through a fusion technique that integrates individual features with a global mean vector, introducing global contextual insights into our analysis. Additionally, we incorporate a pre-trained valence-arousal-dominance (VAD) module from the Wav2Vec 2.0 model. Our fusion employs a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) architecture for efficient temporal analysis of audio data. Utilizing only the provided audio data, our approach demonstrates significant improvements over the established baseline.

Unimodal Multi-Task Fusion for Emotional Mimicry Prediciton

In this study, we propose a methodology for the Emotional Mimicry Intensity (EMI) Estimation task within the context of the 6th Workshop and Competition on Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild. Our approach leverages the Wav2Vec 2.0 framework, pre-trained on a comprehensive podcast dataset, to extract a broad range of audio features encompassing both linguistic and paralinguistic elements. We enhance feature representation through a fusion technique that integrates individual features with a global mean vector, introducing global contextual insights into our analysis. Additionally, we incorporate a pre-trained valence-arousal-dominance (VAD) module from the Wav2Vec 2.0 model. Our fusion employs a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) architecture for efficient temporal analysis of audio data. Utilizing only the provided audio data, our approach demonstrates significant improvements over the established baseline.

The AffectToolbox: Affect Analysis for Everyone

In the field of affective computing, where research continually advances at a rapid pace, the demand for user-friendly tools has become increasingly apparent. In this paper, we present the AffectToolbox, a novel software system that aims to support researchers in developing affect-sensitive studies and prototypes. The proposed system addresses the challenges posed by existing frameworks, which often require profound programming knowledge and cater primarily to power-users or skilled developers. Aiming to facilitate ease of use, the AffectToolbox requires no programming knowledge and offers its functionality to reliably analyze the affective state of users through an accessible graphical user interface. The architecture encompasses a variety of models for emotion recognition on multiple affective channels and modalities, as well as an elaborate fusion system to merge multi-modal assessments into a unified result. The entire system is open-sourced and will be publicly available to ensure easy integration into more complex applications through a well-structured, Python-based code base - therefore marking a substantial contribution toward advancing affective computing research and fostering a more collaborative and inclusive environment within this interdisciplinary field.

Giving Robots a Voice: Human-in-the-Loop Voice Creation and open-ended Labeling

Speech is a natural interface for humans to interact with robots. Yet, aligning a robot's voice to its appearance is challenging due to the rich vocabulary of both modalities. Previous research has explored a few labels to describe robots and tested them on a limited number of robots and existing voices. Here, we develop a robot-voice creation tool followed by large-scale behavioral human experiments (N=2,505). First, participants collectively tune robotic voices to match 175 robot images using an adaptive human-in-the-loop pipeline. Then, participants describe their impression of the robot or their matched voice using another human-in-the-loop paradigm for open-ended labeling. The elicited taxonomy is then used to rate robot attributes and to predict the best voice for an unseen robot. We offer a web interface to aid engineers in customizing robot voices, demonstrating the synergy between cognitive science and machine learning for engineering tools.

Exploring the Dynamics between Cobot's Production Rhythm, Locus of Control and Emotional State in a Collaborative Assembly Scenario

In industrial scenarios, there is widespread use of collaborative robots (cobots), and growing interest is directed at evaluating and measuring the impact of some characteristics of the cobot on the human factor. In the present pilot study, the effect that the production rhythm (C1 - Slow, C2 - Fast, C3 - Adapted to the participant's pace) of a cobot has on the Experiential Locus of Control (ELoC) and the emotional state of 31 participants has been examined. The operators' performance, the degree of basic internal Locus of Control, and the attitude towards the robots were also considered. No difference was found regarding the emotional state and the ELoC in the three conditions, but considering the other psychological variables, a more complex situation emerges. Overall, results seem to indicate a need to consider the person's psychological characteristics to offer a differentiated and optimal interaction experience.

Gaze Detection and Analysis for Initiating Joint Activity in Industrial Human-Robot Collaboration

Collaborative robots (cobots) are widely used in industrial applications, yet extensive research is still needed to enhance human-robot collaborations and operator experience. A potential approach to improve the collaboration experience involves adapting cobot behavior based on natural cues from the operator. Inspired by the literature on human-human interactions, we conducted a wizard-of-oz study to examine whether a gaze towards the cobot can serve as a trigger for initiating joint activities in collaborative sessions. In this study, 37 participants engaged in an assembly task while their gaze behavior was analyzed. We employ a gaze-based attention recognition model to identify when the participants look at the cobot. Our results indicate that in most cases (84.88\%), the joint activity is preceded by a gaze towards the cobot. Furthermore, during the entire assembly cycle, the participants tend to look at the cobot around the time of the joint activity. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to analyze the natural gaze behavior of participants working on a joint activity with a robot during a collaborative assembly task.

Fostering User Engagement in the Critical Reflection of Arguments

A natural way to resolve different points of view and form opinions is through exchanging arguments and knowledge. Facing the vast amount of available information on the internet, people tend to focus on information consistent with their beliefs. Especially when the issue is controversial, information is often selected that does not challenge one's beliefs. To support a fair and unbiased opinion-building process, we propose a chatbot system that engages in a deliberative dialogue with a human. In contrast to persuasive systems, the envisioned chatbot aims to provide a diverse and representative overview - embedded in a conversation with the user. To account for a reflective and unbiased exploration of the topic, we enable the system to intervene if the user is too focused on their pre-existing opinion. Therefore we propose a model to estimate the users' reflective engagement (RUE), defined as their critical thinking and open-mindedness. We report on a user study with 58 participants to test our model and the effect of the intervention mechanism, discuss the implications of the results, and present perspectives for future work. The results show a significant effect on both user reflection and total user focus, proving our proposed approach's validity.

MultiMediate'23: Engagement Estimation and Bodily Behaviour Recognition in Social Interactions

Automatic analysis of human behaviour is a fundamental prerequisite for the creation of machines that can effectively interact with- and support humans in social interactions. In MultiMediate'23, we address two key human social behaviour analysis tasks for the first time in a controlled challenge: engagement estimation and bodily behaviour recognition in social interactions. This paper describes the MultiMediate'23 challenge and presents novel sets of annotations for both tasks. For engagement estimation we collected novel annotations on the NOvice eXpert Interaction (NOXI) database. For bodily behaviour recognition, we annotated test recordings of the MPIIGroupInteraction corpus with the BBSI annotation scheme. In addition, we present baseline results for both challenge tasks.

Towards Automated COVID-19 Presence and Severity Classification

COVID-19 presence classification and severity prediction via (3D) thorax computed tomography scans have become important tasks in recent times. Especially for capacity planning of intensive care units, predicting the future severity of a COVID-19 patient is crucial. The presented approach follows state-of-theart techniques to aid medical professionals in these situations. It comprises an ensemble learning strategy via 5-fold cross-validation that includes transfer learning and combines pre-trained 3D-versions of ResNet34 and DenseNet121 for COVID19 classification and severity prediction respectively. Further, domain-specific preprocessing was applied to optimize model performance. In addition, medical information like the infection-lung-ratio, patient age, and sex were included. The presented model achieves an AUC of 79.0% to predict COVID-19 severity, and 83.7% AUC to classify the presence of an infection, which is comparable with other currently popular methods. This approach is implemented using the AUCMEDI framework and relies on well-known network architectures to ensure robustness and reproducibility.

GANonymization: A GAN-based Face Anonymization Framework for Preserving Emotional Expressions

In recent years, the increasing availability of personal data has raised concerns regarding privacy and security. One of the critical processes to address these concerns is data anonymization, which aims to protect individual privacy and prevent the release of sensitive information. This research focuses on the importance of face anonymization. Therefore, we introduce GANonymization, a novel face anonymization framework with facial expression-preserving abilities. Our approach is based on a high-level representation of a face which is synthesized into an anonymized version based on a generative adversarial network (GAN). The effectiveness of the approach was assessed by evaluating its performance in removing identifiable facial attributes to increase the anonymity of the given individual face. Additionally, the performance of preserving facial expressions was evaluated on several affect recognition datasets and outperformed the state-of-the-art method in most categories. Finally, our approach was analyzed for its ability to remove various facial traits, such as jewelry, hair color, and multiple others. Here, it demonstrated reliable performance in removing these attributes. Our results suggest that GANonymization is a promising approach for anonymizing faces while preserving facial expressions.