CVPR 2011 workshop on gesture recognition

Facial Behaviour Understanding
Maja Pantic
Imperial College London, Computing Dept., UK
University of Twente, EEMCS, Netherlands

A widely accepted prediction is that computing will move to the background, weaving itself into the fabric of our everyday living spaces and projecting the human user into the foreground. To realize this prediction, next-generation computing should develop anticipatory user interfaces that are human-centred, built for humans, and based on naturally occurring multimodal human behaviour such as affective and social signaling.

The facial behaviour is our preeminent means to communicating affective and social signals. This talk discusses a number of components of human facial behavior, how they can be automatically sensed and analysed by computer, what is the past research in the field conducted by the iBUG group at Imperial College London, and how far we are from enabling computers to understand human facial behavior.

Prof. Maja Pantic received MSc and PhD degrees in computer science from Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands, in 1997 and 2001. From 2001 to 2005, she was an Assistant and then an Associate professor at the Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science (EEMCS) at Delft University of Technology. In 2006, she joined the Imperial College London, Department of Computing, UK, where she is full-time Professor of Affective & Behavioural Computing and head of the Intelligent Behaviour Understanding Group (iBUG), working on machine analysis of human non-verbal behaviour and its applications to HCI. From November 2006, she also holds an appointment as a part-time Professor of Affective & Behavioural Computing at EEMCS of the University of Twente, the Netherlands. She was a Visiting Professor at the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, in 2005. In 2002, for her research on Facial Information for Advanced Interface (FIFAI), Prof. Pantic received Dutch Research Council Junior Fellowship (NWO Veni), awarded annually to 7 best young scientists in exact sciences in the Netherlands. In 2008, for her research on Machine Analysis of Human Naturalistic Behavior (MAHNOB), she received European Research Council Starting Grant, awarded annually to 2% best young scientists in any research field in Europe. In 2011, Prof. Pantic received BCS Roger Needham Award, awarded annually to a UK based researcher for a distinguished research contribution in computer science within ten years of their PhD. Prof. Pantic currently serves as the Editor in Chief of Image and Vision Computing Journal (IVCJ) and an Associate Editor for both the IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Part B (TSMC-B) and for the IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM). She was the General Chair for the IEEE Int’l Conf. on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition 2008, Belgium-Netherlands Conf. on Artificial Intelligence 2008, and IEEE Int’l Conf. on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction 2009. She currently serves as the Program Chair for the IEEE Int’l Conf. on Social Computing 2011. Prof. Pantic was also the initiator and co-organiser of both CVPR for Human Communicative Behaviour Analysis (CVPR4HB 2008-2011) and Social Signal Processing Workshop (SSPW 2009-2010). Prof. Pantic is one of the world’s leading experts in the research on machine understanding of human behavior including vision-based detection, tracking, and analysis of human behavioral cues like facial expressions and body gestures, and multimodal analysis of human behaviors like laughter, social signals, and affective states. She is also one of the pioneers in design and development of fully automatic, affect-sensitive human-centered anticipatory interfaces, built for humans based on human models. She has published more than 100 technical papers in the areas of machine analysis of facial expressions and emotions, machine analysis of human body gestures, and human-computer interaction. She is a Senior member of the IEEE, and has served as the Key Note Speaker and an organization/ program committee member at numerous conferences. See also: http://ibug.doc.ic.ac.uk/~maja/.