Socially Aware Computing for Augmenting Virtual Social Interactions

Human-computer interaction is increasingly concerned with the social. Social signal processing – a sub-field of artificial intelligence dealing with the recognition of social cues – enables computers to detect our social behaviour reliably; at the same time, new forms of remote social interaction, such as social virtual reality, attempt to reproduce genuine social interactions such as through tracking non-verbal behaviour and reproducing them on avatars. My research explores how these new computing paradigms dealing with social behaviour can augment, or create new forms of, virtual social interactions. In this seminar, I will illustrate this through two research programmes: first, I will present an overview of my research investigating social simulation applications for soft skills training, here in the context of public speaking. I will discuss research on the design and perception of interactive virtual audiences, approaches to assess public speaker performance automatically from social cues, and studies on the efficacy of combining these tools into new paradigms for public speaking training. In a second part, I will present my current research programme focused on assessing group collaboration dynamics, in contexts ranging from social virtual reality to surgical teams, with the goal of augmenting future remote social interactions and enabling computer systems to better support collaboration.