i++ Departmental Newsletter

Week commencing 11 February 2008

Previous Newsletters

Richard Bartle Listed in guinness world records gamer's edition

Professor Richard Bartle appears in the Guinness World Records Gamer's Edition 2008. On page 170 he is credited with having written the first multi-user video game in 1978 (along with fellow Essex University undergraduate Roy Trubshaw), and on page 184 the "Bartle Test" is cited, which is based on his research - you can take the Bartle Test, which determines your player personality, here at guildcafe.

Simon Lucas to Give Invited Tutorial at PPSN 2008

Dr Simon Lucas will give an invited tutorial on Computational Intelligence in Games at the forthcoming Parallel Problem Solving from Nature conference (PPSN 2008) in Dortmund, September.

The tutorial will provide a practical introduction to game strategy learning with function approximation architectures, covering the two main approaches to learning game strategy: evolution (including co-evolution), and temporal difference learning. Special attention will be given to N-Tuple systems as function
approximators, as these have recently shown great potential to learn quickly and effectively.

Forthcoming Seminar

Dr Nadia Bianchi-Berthouze, University College London (email: n.berthouze@ucl.ac.uk)

Suggested by Dr Francisco Sepulveda

Friday February 22, 3.00pm, Room 1N1.4.1

The Power of Body Posture as a Modality for Affective Human-Computer Interaction

Abstract – In contrast to affective facial and vocal expressions, affective posture has received little attention in the field of affective computing. A reason for that is the sheer complexity and variability of postural language. We report on our studies aimed at using such modality to induce and recognize affective states in users interacting with technology. In the first part of the talk, a model of body movement as a modulator of the experience of the player will be presented. It will be demonstrated, through experiment results, that game controllers that afford natural body movements can change the quality of engagement of the player and can induce a more emotional experience. In the second part it will be shown that technology can capture the quality of experience in its user. A system that learns to recognize the affective state of people from their posture will be presented. While successful experiments have been carried out with acted postures, we are currently testing the system’s ability to detect the more subtle and natural affective states of humans in two different contexts: computer games and clinical setting.