Juan Miguel López

Towards an Ontology for Describing Emotions

The study of emotion in human beings has traditionally been a research interest area in disciplines such as psychology and sociology. The appearance of affective computing paradigm has made it possible to include findings from these disciplines in the development of affective interfaces. Still, there is a lack of applications that take emotion related aspects into account. This situation is mainly due to the great amount of proposed theoretical models and the complexity of human emotions. Besides, the importance that mobile computing area is acquiring has made necessary to bear context related aspects in mind. The proposal presented in this paper is based on a generic ontology for describing emotions and their detection and expression systems taking contextual and multimodal elements into account. The ontology is proposed as a way to develop a formal model that can be easily computerized. Moreover, it is based on a standard, the Web Ontology Language (OWL), which also makes ontologies easily shareable and extensible. Once formalized as an ontology, the knowledge about emotions is used in order to make computers more accessible, personalised and adapted to user needs.

An ontology for description of emotional cues

There is a great variety of theoretical models of emotions and implementation technologies which can be used in the design of affective computers. Consequently, designers and researchers usually made practical choices of models and develop ad-hoc solutions that sometimes lack flexibility. In this paper we introduce a generic approach to modeling emotional cues. The main component of our approach is the ontology of emotional cues. The concepts in the ontology are grouped into three global modules representing three layers of emotions’ detection or production: the emotion module, the emotional cue module, and the media module. The emotion module defines emotions as represented with emotional cues. The emotional cue module describes external emotional representations in terms of media properties. The media module describes basic media properties important for emotional cues. Proposed ontology enables flexible description of emotional cues at different levels of abstraction. This approach could serve as a guide for the flexible design of affective devices independently of the starting model and the final way of implementation.

Methodology for identifying and solving accessibility related issues in web content management system environments

This work presents a methodology that allows identifying and solving accessibility related issues in web pages using Web Content Management System (CMS) environments. In this sense, the methodology establishes a series of steps to be performed in order to ensure that the content managed by CMSs is accessible. A study has been performed on two different CMSs to check the validity of the steps defined in the methodology. The paper includes the methodology used, the evaluation performed on both CMS (OpenCMS and Typo3) and the key findings of the analysis. The results of the study have been positive as the objective of providing CMS environments that allow developing accessible web pages has been fulfilled.

Validating a multilingual and multimodal affective database

This paper summarizes the process of validating RekEmozio, a multilingual (Spanish and Basque) and multimodal (audio and video) affective database. Fifty-seven participants validated a sample of 2,618 videos of facial expressions and 102 utterances in the database. The results replicated previous findings of no significant differences in recognition rates among emotions. This validation has allowed having the audio and video material in the database classified in terms of the emotional category expressed. This normative data has proven to be useful for both training affective recognizers and synthesizers and carrying out empirical studies on emotions by psychologists.

Designing Messenger Visual, an Instant Messaging Service for Individuals with Cognitive Disability

Considering the importance of Internet-based communications in our society, the lack of Instant Messaging (IM) services adapted to individuals with cognitive disabilities who have difficulties using written language creates a situation of exclusion that has a negative impact on their daily lives. To alleviate this situation we present Messenger Visual, an IM service that uses pictograms as the main communication system. Along the paper we introduce the main design aspects of an IM service to support pictogram-based communications, as well as the design and evaluation aspects of an IM client that takes into account both the pictogram-based communication and the user interface accessibility requirements of individuals with cognitive disabilities.

Influence of web content management systems in web content accessibility

Web Content Management Systems (CMS) are traditionally used in institutions to allow web content management by people without technical skills. This study intends to check the influence of the CMS in the accessibility of the contents they handle. First, an accessibility analysis of six widely used CMS is performed base don the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG). Second, an accessibility analysis of a series of city council web pages managed by abovementioned CMS by using Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Results of the study show that although web pages managed by the CMS with a better degree of ATAG fulfilment provide better accessibility, there is no direct correlation between results obtained in both evaluations. Information about what aspects cause accessibility errors in the CMS and the impact of such aspects in accessible web content management is also provided.

Towards remote empirical evaluation of web pages' usability

The functional description of EWEB, a tool for automatic empirical evaluation of web navigation, is presented in this document. EWEB supports naive evaluators for designing experiments which contain experiment type (within-subject, factorial, etc.), web logs to be captured (time, visited pages, etc.), task models (search task, free navigation) and surveys (questionnaires, card sorting) to be performed by experimental participants. EWEB stores navigational data preserving the experiment structure and supports data analysis and interpretation, with the possibility of generating usability metrics. Requiring minimal installation on client computer, EWEB can be used for both lab evaluation and remote evaluation in multiple browsers. One empirical web study, designed and performed by means of EWEB, is described in order to illustrate its validity as a research tool.

A comparison using different speech parameters in the automatic emotion recognition using feature subset selection based on evolutionary algorithms

Study of emotions in human-computer interaction is a growing research area. Focusing on automatic emotion recognition, work is being performed in order to achieve good results particularly in speech and facial gesture recognition. This paper presents a study where, using a wide range of speech parameters, improvement in emotion recognition rates is analyzed. Using an emotional multimodal bilingual database for Spanish and Basque, emotion recognition rates in speech have significantly improved for both languages comparing with previous studies. In this particular case, as in previous studies, machine learning techniques based on evolutive algorithms (EDA) have proven to be the best emotion recognition rate optimizers.

Application of feature subset selection based on evolutionary algorithms for automatic emotion recognition in speech

The study of emotions in human-computer interaction is a growing research area. Focusing on automatic emotion recognition, work is being performed in order to achieve good results particularly in speech and facial gesture recognition. In this paper we present a study performed to analyze different machine learning techniques validity in automatic speech emotion recognition area. Using a bilingual affective database, different speech parameters have been calculated for each audio recording. Then, several machine learning techniques have been applied to evaluate their usefulness in speech emotion recognition, including techniques based on evolutive algorithms (EDA) to select speech feature subsets that optimize automatic emotion recognition success rate. Achieved experimental results show a representative increase in the success rate.

An Intelligent Tutoring System Oriented to the Integration of People with Intellectual Disabilities

The development of Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) based on mobile platforms offers new perspectives for a better integration of people with intellectual disabilities. The LAGUNTXO System aims to achieve the performance of human tutors. Due to the wide diversity related to a person with disabilities, an intelligent structure that may achieve a convenient tutoring system configuration for each case has been incorporated. With an appropriate design of the structure and architecture of this task handler, it is very easy to operate by stakeholders. An automaton-based mechanism has been performed to technologically adapt the large amount of possibilities related to the interaction between people with disabilities, the task that is going to be made autonomously by users, and the mobile system elements. In this paper, LAGUNTXO architecture, operational ways, heuristic evaluation and a pilot study with final users are presented.