The KiDLE project aims to support the inclusion of migrant children/pupils in new school environments by co-creating 5 intercultural board games and integrating them into a digital gaming pack. The project seeks to build educators' and parents' capacity to use games for children's learning and development, implement the gaming pack through gaming events, and raise awareness about the role of cross-cultural games in early childhood education towards supporting inclusion.

The ECI4.0 project aims to develop and validate a prototype of multimodal platform for intelligent analysis of costumer behvior in comercial spaces using computer-vision, sensor fusion, and machinel learning techniques to enable an advancement in terms of the ambient intelligence for specialized retail spaces.

Context: When the OS 9 was introduced in 1999, Apple decided to include a pioneer joke generation system that was capable to interact with the user by delivering a joke in response to the command ’Computer, tell me a joke’. The jokes told by the system were scripted and allowed only for very limited social interaction. However, they were considered a worthy investment because it was believed that they provided the system with a ‘human touch’ (Hempelmann 2008). Besides, humor is also only a circumscribable portion of natural language as a whole and thus, constitutes a well-defined easy engineering goal. This humoristic feature has remained a constant ingredient in later versions of the OS and remains to this day. In fact, humor is a natural emergent feature in everyday conversations and its complexity is hard to capture through scripted, off-context interactions. Moreover, this system (and other similar ones) disregarded the users’ sense of humor and, as often happens in natural language processing, had the user adapting to the system instead of the other way around (Hempelmann 2008). The lack of context, the disregard of user’s preferences, and the over-reliance on certain formats of jokes (e.g. word puns, one-liners) are still limitations found in a large number of current approaches to humor detection, classification, and generation. Our proposal: The central idea of this proposal is that (a) humor is an important feature in human communication that can be leveraged to create more naturalistic and lifelike interactions with robots and (b) humor potentialities can be increased through the delivery of user-personalized humor in naturalistic settings. In particular, we argue that psychological models of humor and its’ everyday functions can be of use when attempting to create a top-down approach of humor that can be modeled to match each user’s preferences. We will use a 2x2 conceptualization of humor that involves the social function of humor (humor used to enhan...

The goal of this project will be to investigate the emotional dimension of movies, to further provide support for the classification, access, navigation and visualization of movie collections, not only including previous descriptors (genre, actors), but also emotions expressed in their content and felt by the viewers, during and after watching movies. This holds the potential to increase emotional awareness and empower future users to regulate their emotions when accessing and watching movies. To accomplish these objectives, there are four scientific challenges that we will address in the project: 1. Evaluate and select most relevant dimensions in emotional impact and predictors of enjoyment and gratifications from movies, understand viewer’s preferences, and the importance perceived in receiving emotional information. This will allow us to identify the most relevant emotional responses to use for the evaluation of the emotional impact, to inform a better support in emotional elicitation, movie classification, and access; 2. Capture the emotional impact of movies, as felt and perceived by the viewers, for classification and indexing. This will help future users to gain more awareness about the emotional impact of watching movies and allow to access movies based on these emotions; 3. Analyze and classify movie content based on the processing of three information streams: subtitles, audio, and visual video content, with a special focus on emotional information; 4. Conceive and create effective interactive access, navigation and visualization of the movies based on their content and their emotional impact on viewers, with the potential to provide insights based on the information visualized, and the users’ emotional profiles, choices, and states. http://awesome.di.fc.ul.pt/

Robots are becoming increasingly common tools for education, assisted living and entertainment. As they are deployed in unstructured social environments for weeks and months, their ability to interact with different users at the same time acquires a fundamental importance. In addition to the circumstances of real-­world settings, there are numerous reasons why having multiple users interacting with a robot at a time is favorable, including limitations of cost, time and space. This project investigates the role of emotions and adaptation in interactions between a robot and a group of users, contrasting to the typical one-­robot one-­user paradigm in Human-­Robot Interaction (HRI). Despite the complex social challenges that long-­term HRI will soon bring, so far little is known about how perception and action selection systems, typically designed for one-­to-­one interactions, will perform in multiparty settings. Recent studies in this area indicate that data-­driven perception mechanisms trained with information from individual interactions do not generalize well in group settings [LML+15], raising the need to investigate new adaptive mechanisms for robots interacting with groups of users. Previous research by members of this team studied social robots in multiparty interactions, yet these robots had limited capabilities and were evaluated in single interactions with users [PPP14]. We address the issue of social adaptation for robots in group settings focusing on computational modeling of emotions. Emotions play a critical role in HRI [Bre03]. Several authors have reported the relevance of emotions in the establishment of social interactions between one robot and one user, in particular the role of empathy. Despite these efforts, further research is necessary to verify whether similar results hold (1) when aiming for longer term social interactions, and (2) when the robot is in the presence of a group of people. The project involves the collaborative effort of INESC...

 Information System (IS) offers much promise to improve information management for physiotherapists. However, the key factor for success of healthcare information system implementation and adoption is engagement of end-user. TailorPhy project aims to develop, apply and evaluate a system of information whose configuration can be tailored to measure the patient’s balance and functional movements during their physiotherapy sessions. The tailored information system, proposed in this project, enable to non-invasively/unobtrusively measure balance and movements as well as to improve the effectiveness of physiotherapy based on serious game and augmented reality.       Wireless body sensor network (WSN) will be developed for better balance and movements’ characterization. The system may improve the effectiveness of physiotherapy and enable measuring additional constructs to enhance more comprehensive clinical reasoning processes (i.e., motor control, determinants for behavioral change and patient engagement).

The visual processing of faces plays a major role in the inter-personal relationships in humans and, consequently, the brain dedicates a lot of resources to this task. Besides the contribution of multiple posterior brain cortical areas, there is functional connectivity to the frontal lobes, which is likely to be related to emotions and memory. Several studies have demonstrated significant functional covariances at a distance, which seem to implicate synchronization between the cortical rhythms of the different areas. The limbic theta rhythm has gained particular prominence as a possible synchronizing mechanism between distant areas, despite the fact that no strong causal between this rhythm and the functions that are attributed to it have been demonstrated. Specifically, it has not been possible to demonstrate whether the association between EEG brain rhythms and the information processing taking place in the same cortical area is a causal one and not an epiphenomena. To give an experimental response to the last point, it was planned to study the functional connectivity between the frontal lobe and the posterior brain areas involved in the visual processing of faces, with a special emphasis in the theta rhythm. Experimental modulation of the frontal lobe theta rhythm was performed using TMS, and the resulting effects in the processing of faces were determined. The effect of placebo was controlled by using a similar protocol but with sham TMS. The final outcome of the study was a detailed characterization of the role played by the frontal lobe theta rhythm in several aspects of the visual processing of faces.

The “Health Care Clown Pathways” project is a Strategic Partnership supporting innovation in the Educational and Vocational Training Sector (VET).  This project has been created for the importance of the professional role of the Healthcare Clown professional in the performing arts, aimed at assist and relieve the patients’ anxiety and fear, especially in children and elders, in the healthcare institutions and social care services. This project was born to provide for this gap in the training sector.

The current research project examined theoretical and methodological issues in the field of the video game violence research by integrating the contribution from different lines of research. From a theoretically perspective, the General Aggression Model (GAM) standed as the widely accepted approach to video game violence, integrating several prior theories of aggression. The authors have extended this model to explain desensitization effects, sustaining that playing violent video games (VGs) may desensitize individuals to violence, through both short- and long-term exposures. However, few studies in media violence research examined whether playing VGs affects desensitization and those who investigated this effect relied solely on physiological indicators of arousal. In our view, to clarify the phenomenon of emotional desensitization we must integrate the findings from theoretical approaches of emotions. Based on the Circumplex Model of affect, our previous studies have measured the two dimensions of emotion proposed (arousal and valence) by assessing skin conductance responses (SCR) (a physiological measure of arousal) and self-reported measures of both arousal and valence. In both studies we found that those who previously played the VG, compared to the non-VG condition, felt less displeasure toward real-word violent images. Therefore, in our view, valence (the displeasure-pleasure dimension) showed to be relevant to explain our affective responses toward violence (i.e., emotional desensitization).The possibility that these emotional responses might explain the relation between playing VGs and aggression was further addressed. We found that those who felt less displeased with the real-word violence were more aggressive toward another person; additionally, this dimension partially mediated the effect of playing a VG on aggression. Given those results, it would be relevant to continue evaluating both dimensions of emotions. In the current project we will use several ...