Learning deep physiological models of affect

More than 15 years after the early studies in Affective Computing (AC), [1] the problem of detecting and modeling emotions in the context of human-computer interaction (HCI) remains complex and largely unexplored. The detection and modeling of emotion is, primarily, the study and use of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques for the construction of computational models of emotion. The key challenges one faces when attempting to model emotion [2] are inherent in the vague definitions and fuzzy boundaries of emotion, and in the modeling methodology followed. In this context, open research questions are still present in all key components of the modeling process. These include, first, the appropriateness of the modeling tool employed to map emotional manifestations and responses to annotated affective states; second, the processing of signals that express these manifestations (i.e., model input); and third, the way affective annotation (i.e., model output) is handled. This paper touches upon all three key components of an affective model (i.e., input, model, output) and introduces the use of deep learning (DL) [3], [4], [5] methodologies for affective modeling from multiple physiological signals.