Next Wednesday, Dr. Çiğdem Beyan (Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia) is going to give a seminar on Social Signal Processing (SSP) approaches, particularly for emergent leadership, for Multimedia Informatics - Research Methods (MMI 700) course. You are all kindly invited. Sorry for multiple copies.

Location: Conference Room (124), METU Informatics Institute
Time: December 27, 2017, 11:30-12:30

Abstract:

Social interactions are the main facet of human life and also the fundamental research area for social psychology. Even though psychologists have been working on social interactions for a very long time, the automatic analysis of them is a relatively new problem. Social signal processing (SSP) is the field which aims to analyze human interactions in an automatic way using the recent advances in machine analysis (e.g. speech processing, computer vision, machine learning). In this talk, I will survey some approaches and results regarding identification of the social interactions in small group meeting environments particularly for emergent leadership. In detail, a new corpus that has been collected using portable audio and video sensors, novel nonverbal features proposed and the computational methods used will be addressed.

Bio:

Cigdem Beyan is a postdoctoral researcher at Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT), Pattern Analysis and Computer Vision (PAVIS) department since September 2015. In PAVIS-IIT, she has been working on social signal processing. She obtained her Ph.D. degree (2015) in School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, UK, under supervision of Prof. Robert B. Fisher. Her thesis was a part of EU project (FP7) called Fish4Knowledge, in which she mainly investigated fish behaviour understanding. Prior to that, she received her MSc. degree (2010) in School of Informatics, Middle East Technical University where she worked on multiple object tracking and abandoned-object detection utilizing multi-modalities. Beyond her research background, she has a teaching experience (in Turkey and in UK) for 6 years. Additionally, she has been an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in recognition of attainment against the UK Professional Standards Framework for teaching and learning support in higher education since 2014. She contributed to the computer vision, machine learning and multimedia domains by being (co-) author of more than 25 research papers and has a PCT Patent Application to WIPO. She is a reviewer for various international journals such as Pattern Recognition, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering and IEEE Transactions on Multimedia and for the conferences such as CVPR, ICCV, BMVC, and ICPR.