HUMAINE (Human-Machine-Interaction Network on Emotion) is a NoE (Network of Excellence) within the European framework of FP6 running from 1.2004 to 12.2007; contract no. 507422. HUMAINE aims to lay the foundations for European development of systems that can register, model and/or influence human emotional and emotion-related states and processes - 'emotion-oriented systems'. Such systems may be central to future interfaces, but their conceptual underpinnings are not sufficiently advanced to be sure of their real potential or the best way to develop them. One of the reasons is that relevant knowledge is dispersed across many disciplines. HUMAINE brings together leading experts from the key disciplines in a programme designed to achieve intellectual integration. It identifies six thematic areas that cut across traditional groupings and offer a framework for an appropriate division of labour - theory of emotion; signal/sign interfaces; the structure of emotionally coloured interactions; emotion in cognition and action; emotion in communication and persuasion; and usability of emotion-oriented systems. Teams linked to each area will run a workshop in it and carry out joint research to define an exemplar embodying guiding principles for future work in their area. Cutting across these are plenary sessions where teams from all areas report; activities to create necessary infrastructure (databases recognising cultural and gender diversity, an ethical framework, an electronic portal); and output to the wider community in the form of a handbook and recommendations of good practice (as precursors to formal standards). FAU Erlangen participates in WP4 on Signals and Signs, and in WP5 on Databases. In the first year, activities concentrated on a kick-off meeting, a summer school on databases, and workshops on theory, signals and signs, and databases. Deliverables were due at the end of 2004 describing in detail so called exemplars, i.e., pieces of work in each of the areas which exemplify how a key problem in the area can be solved in a principled way; and which also demonstrates how work focused on that area can integrate with work focused on the other areas. The exact form of an exemplar is not prespecified: it may be a working system, but it might also be a well-developed design, or a representational system, or a method for user-centred design. As exemplar, our institute initiated a so called forced co-operation initiative called CEICES (Combining Efforts for Improving automatic Classification of Emotional user States): we provide an annotated emotional database (i.e. speech files, phonetic lexicon, manually corrected word segmentation, emotional labels, manually corrected fundamental frequency values, syntactic-prosodic boundary labels) and a definition of train and test samples. All participating HUMAINE partners share extracted feature values; the common goal is improved recognition rates and a repertoire of most relevant features.

Head: Nöth, Elmar

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Team: Batliner, Anton
Hacker, Christian
Hönig, Florian
Steidl, Stefan

Start: 2004-01-01
End: 2007-12-31