Introduction

Hello and welcome to the amazing blog by some guy called Jeroen! As a final project for my Master's degree I decided to go to the USA for a research internship, and as it turns out, a research institute of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles was willing to put up with me. This institute is called ICT - Institute for Creative Technologies.

Before my departure to the United States I had a few email conversations with my supervisor-to-be, professor Jonathan Gratch, with regards to the nature of the internship. He had already done quite some research into the impact of facial expressions of a virtual character on a human when someone was playing a game against this personal character. However, the game that was used for all of these experiments - Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma - can be played in different ways, the real goal of the game isn't very clear. This means that the motives of the virtual character could be interpreted in multiple ways when it is displaying some kind of facial expression.

My general project description would be to look closer into facial expressions while playing a game and for my personal interest I would like to focus more on the gaming aspect. The result of the email communication with prof. Gratch was the following broad project description:

In many social situations, another person’s expressed emotion affects our impression of the motives behind his or her actions.  We trust others partly on the basis of facial appearance, including its emotional aspects, partly on the basis of whether signaled emotions seem sincere, and partly on the basis of a sense of emotional rapport.  In these and other ways, emotional information can help to co-ordinate different people’s actions and intentions.  However, people can also manipulate their emotion presentations in order to conceal or disguise their motives. In this project, we will uses computer technology to gain insight into these emotional processes. 

One or more simple games (e.g., prisoner’s dilemma) will be created where the face and choices of both players will be recorded as they play. Computer analysis of these expressions will provide a grasp of which facial expressions result in a certain decision being made. In another set of experiments we will use these expressions to purposefully manipulate the other player into a certain decision.

 In this blog I will attempt to write down the different problems, solutions and experiences that come up during the course of my internship, for as far as I am allowed to speak of the research that I am working on, since I might not be allowed to disclose everything. Since I will try to get into as much detail as possible, these blog posts could get a bit technical, just a word of warning :)

I will be maintaining two different blogs during my stay in the United States: this one, and a blog that focuses on activities that are not related to my research into facial expressions and gaming. This blog can be found at http://la-pruik.blogspot.com, but that blog will be in Dutch. A link to this blog will be available in the menu to the right.