ILHAIRE took an active part in the fifth biennial Humaine Association Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII) which was held in Geneva, Switzerland in September 2013. Out of the 175 submitted papers for the mainstream conference, 55 were accepted for oral presentation, including 3 ILHAIRE papers. In addition, Mancini et al.’s paper “Towards automated full body detection of laughter driven by human expert annotation” was presented during the International Workshop on Affective Interaction in Natural Environments (AFFINE): Interacting with Affective Artefacts in the Wild, which was organized as a satellite of ACII.

We had great pleasure in seeing the quality of our work appreciated by the scientific community. In addition to the positive feedback received after the presentations, all three of our papers in the mainstream conference were nominated for best paper awards:

Harry Griffin et al.'s paper "Laughter Type Recognition from Whole Body Motion" and Gary McKeown et al.'s paper "Human Perception of Laughter from Context-free Whole Body Motion Dynamic Stimuli" were both among the 3 nominees for best paper award elected by the Humaine association. The prize was won by Harry Griffin and his co-authors.

Jérôme Urbain et al.'s paper "Automatic Phonetic Transcription of Laughter and its Application to Laughter Synthesis" received the best student paper award sponsored by Technicolor.

Congratulations to all the authors of the winning and nominated ILHAIRE papers! All these papers can be found on the "Results" page of this website.

How does laughter look like…

From slight amusement to rolling on the floor in face, voice, and body.

This August and September, the aisles of the department for Personality Psychology and Assessment are filled with laughter again. The team at UZH is integrating the inevitable signs of laughter in different modalities into a dimensional description system. For this, codings of the facial expressions, codings of the body movements and features of the laughter vocalizations are analyzed. The findings of this study are presented at the SPG congress of the Swiss Psychological Society in Basel (for more information: http://www.ssp-sgp2013.ch/cms/home).

At this conference, the ILHAIRE consortium contributes a full symposium on laughter research, including the teams of Queens University Belfast, the University of Mons, the University of Genova, CNRS Paris, and the University of Zurich. Here are the contribution titles:

1) Advances in knowledge on the expressive features of laughter (UZH)

2) A lexical study of laughter (UZH)

3) Automated analysis of laughter from full-body movement (UNIGE)

4) In defence of laughter (QUB)

5) Infected with amusement — by the laughter of a laughing virtual agent (UMONS, CNRS, UZH)

ILHAIRE partners are delighted to announce they have been selected to contribute to the upcoming ICT event in Vilnius on 6-8 November 2013. ICT is the major networking event regarding Information and Communication Technologies research activities within the EU Framework Programmes for Research. This year, more than 4000 researchers, innovators, entrepreneurs, industry representatives, young people and politicians are expected. A particular focus will be placed on Horizon 2020, the EU's Framework Programme for Research and Innovation for 2014-2020.

Besides an extensive conference and networking programme covering scientific, industrial and societal aspects of ICT research, the event will also include a science and technology exhibition giving the opportunity for projects and companies to showcase their research, ICT products and innovative creations. ILHAIRE will be part of the "culture, science and creativity" section of the ICT 2013 exhibition.

Laughter is all around us. It is sometimes contagious and most often impacts on one's mood, yet not always towards positive emotions. Laughter also has meanings and impacts on the course of conversations. Laughter expression is also affected by social rules. Gathering knowledge related to laughter, from both the psychology and the human-computer interaction perspectives, and transferring this understanding to the design of embodied conversational agents will enable them with both emotional and conversational competence that will increase their impact and application potential. The ILHAIRE exhibit will be presenting some of the main outcomes of the project after two years of operation in a highly interactive fashion. The visitors will be able to experience a range of short interaction scenarios and games with laughter-enabled avatars, and interact with experts in both psychology and engineering. We hope the exhibit will impact on the global mood of the ICT event.