Research Interests
Welcome! I am lecturer at the University of Glasgow (Department of Computing Science) and senior researcher of the Idiap Research Institute (Martigny, Switzerland), where I spent ten beautiful years before coming to Glasgow (1999-2009).
My main research interest is the analysis of nonverbal-social behavior in real world situations like debates and meetings. In particular my work focuses on four major social phenomena: emergence and dynamics of conflicts, display of status and power relationships, role recognition, and communication effectiveness. This line of research builds upon Multimedia Content Analysis, which provides background for the extraction of information from audio and video recordings, and moves towards a new, emerging, domain called Social Signal Processing (SSP), which aims at recognizing social behavior through modeling, analysis and synthesis of nonverbal behavior. This activity involves three main components. The first is the identification of physical evidences and machine detectable aspects of human behavior most correlated with the social phenomena of interest. The second is the investigation of Multimedia Analysis techniques for the detection of behavior evidences. The third area is the automatic recognition of behavioral cues in terms of social signals, i.e. of relational attitudes exchanged by people.
You want to know more? Please read the following articles:
- A.Vinciarelli, M.Pantic and H.Bourlard
Social Signal Processing: Survey of an Emerging Domain
Image and Vision Computing Journal, Vol. 27, No. 12, pp. 1743-1759 (2009). - A.Vinciarelli
Capturing Order in Social Interactions
IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, Vol. 26, No. 12, pp. 133-137 (2009).
Contact Alessandro : August 10th, 2009.
Major Activities
- Coordinator, in collaboration with Maja Pantic (Imperial College), of a European Network of Excellence called Social Signal Processing Network (SSPNet). The network aims at establishing a European research community on modeling analysis and synthesis of social signals.
- Principal Investigator of Cross-Cultural Personality Perception, an international collaboration aimed at investigating the effect of social signals and culture on perception of personality traits.
- Head of the Integrated Project Social Signal Processing in the framework of IM2, a large national Swiss collaboration aimed at multimodal analysis of meetings.
- Associate Editor of Discourse, Context and Media (Elsevier).
- Guest Editor of the Special Issue on Affect Based on Human Behavior Understanding (IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing), with Albert Ali Salah, Theo Gevers.
- Guest Editor of the Special Issue on Computer Vision for Ambient Intelligence (Jaournal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments), with Albert Ali Salah, Theo Gevers and Nicu Sebe.
- Guest Editor of the Special Issue on "Social Signals. From theory to application" (Cognitive Processing), with Isabella Poggi and Francesca D'Errico.
- Supervisor of three PhD students: Anna Polychroniou, Gelareh Mohammadi and Hugues Salamin.
- Co-founder and CTO of Klewel , a knowledge management company recognized through several national (Swiss) and international awards.
Contact Alessandro : August 10th, 2009.
Events
- Dec. 1, 2011 - Chair of Third International Workshop on Social Signal Processing, in collaboration with Maja Pantic and Alex Pentland, Scottsdale (USA).
- Nov. 12, 2011 - Chair of Second International Workshop on Socially Intelligent Surveillance and Monitoring, in collaboration with Maja Pantic and Alex Pentland, Scottsdale (USA).
- Oct. 9-11, 2011 - Program Chair of IEEE Conference on Social Computing, in collaboration with Maja Pantic and Justin Zhan, Boston (USA).
- Oct. 9-12, 2011 - Chair of Special Session on Social Signal Processing at the IEEE Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, in collaboration with Maja Pantic, Anchorage (USA).
- Aug. 14-20, 2011 - Invited lecturer at the National Swedish Research School for Cognitive Science, organized by Jens Allwood, Marston Hill, Mullsjo (Sweden).
- May 27, 2011 - Key note speaker at the Workshop on Social Behavior in Music, organized by Antonio Camurri, Genova (Italy).
- Apr. 18-19, 2011 - Chair of the International Workshop on Voice and Speech Processing in Social Interactions, in collaboration with Pascal Belin, Glasgow (UK).
- Feb. 21-26, 2011 - Invited speaker at the Training School on Cognitive Behavioral Systems, organized by Anna Esposito and Ruediger Hofmann, Dresden (Germany).
- Nov. 11-13, 2010 - Invited speaker at the Interdisciplinary Workshop on Society, Culture and Language , organized by Angelo Cangelosi, Plymouth (UK).
- Nov. 10-12, 2010 - Co-Chair of Political Speech - Il Parlato Politico, with Isabella Poggi, Francesca D'Errico, Laura Vincze, Rome (Italy).
- Oct. 29, 2010 - Co-Chair of the International Workshop on Social Signal Processing, with Maja Pantic and Alex Pentland, Florence (Italy).
- Aug. 27, 2010 - Invited speaker at the Unveiling Affective Signals, organized by Egon van den Broek, Anton Nijholt and Joyce Westerink, Eindhoven (NL).
- Aug. 22, 2010 - Co-Chair of the International Workshop on Human Behavior Understanding, with Albert Ali Salah, Theo Gevers and Nicu Sebe, Istanbul (Turkey).
- Aug. 4-6, 2010 - Invited speaker at the Workshop on Human Communication Dynamics, organized by Louis-Philippe Morency and Nigel Ward (Institute for Creative Technologies), Los Angeles (USA).
- Jul. 18-23, 2010 - Invited lecturer at the Plus VIPS School on Social Signal Processing, organized by Vittorio Murino and Marco Cristani (Italian Institute of Technology), Sestri Levante (Italy).
- Jun. 14, 2010 - Co-Chair of the International Workshop on Socially Intelligent Surveillance and Monitoring, with Vittorio Murino, Marco Cristani and Isabella Poggi, San Francisco (USA).
- Mar. 15-19, 2010 - Invited lecturer at the COST 2102 International Training School, organized by Anna Esposito (University Naples, Italy), Rome (Italy).
- Dec. 3-5, 2009 - Co-General Chair of the Workshop on Foundations of Social Signals, in collaboration with Isabella Poggi and Francesca D'Errico (University Roma Tre, Italy), Rome (Italy).
- Sep. 13, 2009 - Co-General Chair of the Workshop on Social Signal Processing, in collaboration with Maja Pantic (Imperial College London), Amsterdam (The Netherlands).
- Sep. 2, 2009 - Invited to Impatience, scientific magazine of Radio Suisse Romande, the Swiss national broadcast service.
- Jun. 28, 2009 - Chair of the Special Session on "Implicit Human Centered Tagging" at the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo, New York (USA)
- Jun. 25, 2009 - Key-note speaker at the International Workshop on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition for Human Behaviour (CVPR4HB), Miami (USA).
- Jun. 23, 2009 - Key-note speaker at the International Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP), Trento (Italy).
- Jan. 29, 2009 - Featured in the Picture of the month of Horizon, the magazine of the Swiss National Science Foundation dedicated to the research in Switzerland.