Fabio Pianesi

Going beyond traits: multimodal classification of personality states in the wild

Recent studies in social and personality psychology introduced the notion of personality states conceived as concrete behaviors that can be described as having the same contents as traits. Our paper is a first step towards addressing automatically this new perspective. In particular, we will focus on the classification of excerpts of social behavior into personality states corresponding to the Big Five traits, rather than focusing on the more traditional goal of using those behaviors to directly infer about the personality traits of the person producing them. The multimodal behavioral cues we exploit were obtained by means of the Sociometric Badges worn by people working at a research institution for a period of six weeks. We investigate the effectiveness of cues concerning acted social behaviors as well as of other situational characteristics for the sake of personality state classification. The encouraging results show that our classifiers always, and sometimes greatly, improve the performances of a random baseline classifier (from 1.5 to 1.8 better than chance). At a general level, we believe that these results support the proposed shift from the classification of personality traits to the classification of personality states.

Modeling dominance effects on nonverbal behaviors using granger causality

In this paper we modeled the effects that dominant people might induce on the nonverbal behavior (speech energy and body motion) of the other meeting participants using Granger causality technique. Our initial hypothesis that more dominant people have generalized higher influence was not validated when using the DOME-AMI corpus as data source. However, from the correlational analysis some interesting patterns emerged: contradicting our initial hypothesis dominant individuals are not accounting for the majority of the causal flow in a social interaction. Moreover, they seem to have more intense causal effects as their causal density was significantly higher. Finally dominant individuals tend to respond to the causal effects more often with complementarity than with mimicry.

Multimodal recognition of personality during short self-presentations

Personality plays an important role in the way people manage the images they convey in self-presentations and employment interviews, trying to affect the others first impressions and increase effectiveness. This paper addresses the automatically detection of the Big Five personality traits from short self-presentations, by investigating the effectiveness of various simple non-verbal acoustic and visual social signals.

The Collaborative Workspace: A Co-located Tabletop Device to Support Meetings

In this chapter, we describe the design and development of co-located multi user collaborative displays that aim to support effective social interactions within a small group of professionals engaged in meeting activities. Several studies have investigated and tried to go beyond the design paradigm developed for single-user/singledesktop interaction in order to support face-to-face collaborative activities. Several helpful design principles have emerged from research on shared workspaces and colocated technologies.

Causal-modelling of personality traits: extraversion and locus of control

This work contributes to the task of automatically analyzing peoples personality during social interaction by using acoustic and visual features. We focus on two personality traits: Extraversion, one of the Big Five dimensions, and the Locus of Control and submit them to two causal Bayesian models that differ according to whether they incorporate the effect of the context (other peoples behaviour) on the targets behaviour. The experiment performed shows that for the Extraversion trait the causal model whereby the targets behaviour is affected by both his/her personality and the parties behaviour performs much better than the simpler one that only considers the relationships between personality and the targets behaviour. Nothing similar is found for the Locus of Control, confirming psychology studies that maintain that the latter traits behavioural manifestation is verbal rather than non-verbal.

Virtual helper or virtual card player? contrasting responses of older users

In the NETCARITY project, we conducted several complementary investigation activities with elderly people revolving around the design of technology for the home environment. In this paper, we investigate the potential impact of virtual characters in making the interaction with the technology-enhanced home more effective and engaging. We briefly discuss two experiences in using a virtual agent as an interface metaphor for a computer system targeted to elderly people with very low computer skill. The lesson that can be learned from those experiences is that a virtual agent may sometimes be effectively used to improve the acceptance of new technologies for this class of users. In particular, in settings characterized by a social interaction, where emotional stress is low (as with entertainment applications), the presence of a virtual character facilitates the acceptance of the technology by helping it to fit into the social environment. In the opposite case, in contexts where trust is an important factor or in life-threatening situations, a virtual agent is less likely to be credible.

Automatic Relational Reporting to Support Group Dynamics

The complexity of social dynamics occurring in small group interactions often hinders the performance of teams. The availability of rich multimodal information about what is going on during the meeting makes it possible to explore the possibility of providing various kinds of support to dysfunctional teams, from facilitation to training sessions addressing both the individuals and the group as a whole. A necessary step in this direction is that of automatically capturing and understanding group dynamics. In order to improve the performance of meetings, external interventions by experts such as facilitators and trainers are commonly employed. Facilitators participate in the meetings as external elements of the group, and their role is to help participants maintain a fair and focused behavior as well as to direct and set the pace of the discussion.

Activities Distribution Around a Horizontal Interface Supporting Small Group Meetings

In this paper, we present a preliminary field study aimed at investigating collaborative work activities supported by a horizontal interface. We analyzed the use of system by focusing on activities distribution and on coordination dynamics during actual meetings. The results have implications for the understanding of social dynamics occurring when groups of users explore horizontal displays.