Engineering the Impact of Emotion on Human Behavior (OFAI Lecture by Stacy Marsella)
Channel: Austrian Research Institute for AI (OFAI)
Date: 2023-06-02

Engineering the Impact of Emotion on Human Behavior
Prof. Stacy Marsella, BA, MS, PhD, Northeastern University and University of Glasgow
17 May 2023

Computational models of human behavior are used in a wide range of artifacts. At a large scale, social simulations are being used, for example, to explore people’s response to a natural disaster. At a medium-scale, models of human decision-makers are being used to study social technical systems such as the pharmaceutical drug supply networks. At the individual scale, work on human-robot and human-agent interaction seeks to facilitate interaction by giving artificial agents models of their human partners. At the extreme of modeling individual human behavior, virtual replicas of humans are being crafted, facsimiles of people that can engage people in face-to-face interactions using the same verbal and nonverbal behavior people use. The designs of these various models heavily leverage psychological theories and data. Psychology and the social sciences, in turn, use these computational artifacts as means to formulate, test, and explore theories about human behavior. In this talk, I will first give a brief overview of my group’s work in social simulation, social technical systems, HRI and virtual humans. Then I will exemplify the synergy between psychology and the engineering of these artifacts from the perspective of my group’s work on developing and applying computational models of emotion.