4th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis

INVITED SPEAKERS

Prof. Dr. Rosalind Picard is founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Laboratory, co-director of the Things That Think Consortium, the largest industrial sponsorship organization at the lab, and leader of the new and growing Autism & Communication Technology Initiative at MIT. She is co-founder, chief scientist and director of Affectiva, Inc., making technology to help measure and communicate emotion. Picard holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering with highest honors from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and master's and doctorate degrees, both in electrical engineering and computer science, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Prior to completing her doctorate at MIT, she was a Member of the Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories where she designed VLSI chips for digital signal processing and developed new methods of image compression and analysis. In 1991 she joined the MIT Media Lab faculty. She became internationally known for constructing mathematical texture models for content-based retrieval of images, for creating new tools such as the Photobook system, and for pioneering methods of automated search and annotation in digital video. The year before she was up for tenure, she published the award-winning book Affective Computing, which was instrumental in starting a new field by that name. Picard has been awarded dozens of distinguished and named lectureships internationally and in 2005 was honored as a Fellow of the IEEE for contributions to image and video analysis and affective computing.

Prof. Dr. Jonathan Gratch is an Associate Director for Virtual Human Research at the University of Southern California's (USC) Institute for Creative Technologies, Research Associate Professor of Computer Science and Psychology at USC and co-director of USC's Computational Emotion Group. He completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Illinois in Urban-Champaign in 1995. Dr. Gratch's research focuses on computational models of human cognitive and social processes, especially emotion, and explores these models' role in shaping human-computer interactions in virtual environments. He studies the relationship between cognition and emotion, the cognitive processes underlying emotional responses, and the influence of emotion on decision making and physical behavior. He is the founding and current Editor-in-Chief of IEEE's Transactions on Affective Computing, Associate Editor of Emotion Review and the Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, former President of the HUMAINE Association, the international society for research on emotion and human-computer interaction, and is a member of IEEE, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and the International Society for Research on Emotion (ISRE). Dr. Gratch is the author of over 150 technical articles.

"Decoding emotions: How findings in emotion research can enrich sentiment analysis"

Sentiment analysis has largely focused on problem of classifying the polarity of text -e.g., does a movie review express a positive or negative opinion of the film. Sentiment is simply one of many phenomena examined by affective computing research. In this talk I will discuss more generally the challenge of detecting, and more importantly, inferring mental states from affective cues. Whether they are produced 'unconsciously' (as in the facial expressions of someone reacting to an emotional event) or deliberately (as in the writing of a text or the performance of an actor), affective signals convey meaning and support inferences about the opinions, beliefs, and future actions of the 'author'. I will emphasize the important role that emotion theory can play in automating such inferences. I will review different theoretical perspectives on emotion, illustrate how they relate to automatic recognition and understanding techniques, and discuss the possible implications of these findings for sentiment research.

Dr. Theresa Wilson is a research scientist at the Human Language Technology Center of Excellence at Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on the understanding and recognition of subjective and opinionated language. Previously, she was a Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, School of Informatics, in the Human Communication Research Centre. During her time there, she worked on annotating and automatically recognizing various types of subjective content in meetings as part of the AMIDA Project. She also worked on social role recognition in meetings as part of SSPnet. Dr. Wilson received her doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh, Intelligent Systems Program in 2008. She has a masters in Computer Science, also from the University of Pittsburgh, and a bachelors in Computer Science from the College of Wooster in Ohio.