Andrea Gargano is Visiting the Robust Data Science Group

Andrea Gargano is a PhD Student with the Group of Prof. Enzo Pasquale Scilingo, doing research under his and Prof. Mimma Nardelli's supervision, at the School of Engineering – University of Pisa, Italy. He is visiting the Robust Data Science Group for 6 months. He recently gave a talk entitled “Physiological and Emotional-Annotated Time Series Analysis for Affective Computing and Biomedical Applications“.

Emotions can be regarded as dynamic processes arising from a complex interplay of various factors, including conscious experience, physiological processes, and contextual elements. Searching for novel methodologies to recognise different human emotional states by measuring their physiological signals is an ongoing challenge in the Affective Computing community. But how can we investigate human emotions? And how can the conscious perception of emotions be linked to variations in physiological signals? In his talk, Andrea Gargano briefly introduced the audience to state-of-the-art psychological techniques used to self-assess emotions via annotations and to more advanced techniques for real-time annotation. Then, the focus was narrowed towards his recent advances in developing novel methods from the nonlinear time series analysis field to characterise self-assessed annotated emotion ratings and physiological signals. Interesting patterns that emerged from the multivariate analysis of these time series were presented. Future developments were critically discussed with the audience.