In spoken interactions, face-to-face meetings are often preferred. This is because the human face is highly expressive and can facilitate coordinated interactions. Embodied conversational agents with expressive faces therefore have the potential for smoother interactions than voice assistants. However, knowledge of how the face expresses these social signals – the “language” of facial expressions – is limited, with no coherent modelling framework.

This ambitious project aims to mathematically model the human face as an algebraic generator of dynamic social signals and build a psychologically and culturally valid generative model of social face signalling that is transferable to social robots. 

The Department of Philosophy is accepting applications for a McDonnell Postdoctoral Fellowship for the 2021-2022 academic year in the Department’s program in Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology (PNP).