Modeling Facial Expressions of Emotions

As users’ expectations grow in terms of friendliness of human-machine interfaces, the ubiquitous and affective computing domains investigate the use of embodied conversational agents (ECAs) that can express emotion. ECAs are virtual agents that can autonomously communicate verbally and non-verbally with a user. Focus on this area of research is driven by a desire to improve human–machine interactions through the use of social and emotional signals. To express emotions, the agent needs to have access to a model that identifies a method of communication that can be understood by humans and also be endowed with non-verbal communication means.