Maxine: Embodied Conversational Agents for Multimodal Emotional Communication

Emotions are fundamental to human experience, influencing cognition, perception and everyday tasks such as learning, communication and even rational decision-making. Humancomputer interaction (HCI) systems capable of sensing user affective state and giving adequate affective feedback are, therefore, likely to be perceived as more natural, persuasive and trustworthy (Cassell & Bickmore, 2000). Affective Computing (Picard, 1997) is the research area concerned with computing that relates to, arises from, or deliberately influences emotion. Affective computing expands HCI by including emotional communication together with appropriate means of handling affective information. Last scientific researches indicate that emotions play an essential role in perception, decision making abilities, problem-solving process and learning.