Dr. Oya Çeliktutan (Imperial College London) is going to give a seminar titled "Human Behaviour Analysis in Interactions with Virtual Agents and Robots" for Multimedia Informatics - Multimedia Standards (MMI 726) course. You are all kindly invited.

Location: Conference Room (124), METU Informatics Institute
Time: January 5, 2018, 13:30-14:30

Title: Human Behaviour Analysis in Interactions with Virtual Agents and Robots

Abstract:

Socially intelligent agents and robots are soon to be a fact of everyday life due to the rapid growth in the fields of affective computing, human-machine interaction and social robotics. Numerous innovative applications in healthcare, education and entertainment motivate the development of ever more sophisticated machines that are capable of interpreting human behaviours and adapting to user’s profile, namely, personality, preferences and needs. To realise this vision, one of the prominent research problems is automatic personality analysis. Personality is key in communication: people observe others and form impressions regarding their personalities, and adapt their own behaviours to maintain others’ engagement during social interactions. Doing so is a natural routine for humans. In this talk, I will show how this mechanism can be automated for human-virtual agent and human-robot interactions, and I will highlight our research findings on personality and its relationship with engagement. I will continue my talk with a brief introduction to our current work towards deploying such technologies in healthcare, and I will conclude by discussing open problems in the area.


Bio:

Oya Celiktutan is a postdoctoral researcher in the Personal Robotics Lab in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College London, United Kingdom. Before this, she was a postdoctoral researcher in the Computer Lab at University of Cambridge between 2016 and 2017, and in the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London between 2013 and 2015. She obtained her PhD degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Bogazici University, Turkey, in collaboration with National Institute of Applied Sciences of Lyon, France, in 2013. Her research focuses on computer vision and machine learning within a context of applied work in the areas of human behaviour understanding, affective computing, human-computer interaction and human-robot interaction. She is particularly interested in building smart algorithms to equip machines with the capability of sensing, recognising and interpreting human behaviours for enabling personalised, engaging and assistive interactions with machines.