Human face-to-face communication is a little like a dance, in that participants continuously adjust their behaviors based on verbal and nonverbal displays and signals. Human interpersonal behaviors have long been studied in linguistic, communication, sociology and psychology. The recent advances in machine learning, pattern recognition and signal processing enabled a new generation of computational tools to analyze, recognize and predict human communication behaviors during social interactions. This new research direction have broad applicability, including the improvement of human behavior recognition, the synthesis of natural animations for robots and virtual humans, the development of intelligent tutoring systems, and the diagnoses of social disorders (e.g., autism spectrum disorder).

In this talk, I will present some of our recent work modeling multiple aspects of human communication dynamics, including behavioral dynamic, multimodal dynamic and interpersonal dynamic. I will describe the different computational models specifically designed model these dynamics, including the Latent-Dynamic Conditional Random Fields, Multi-view Hidden Conditional Random Fields and the Latent Mixture of Discriminative Experts. I will show how these technologies can be applied to real-world problems such as negotiation outcome prediction, YouTube opinion mining, group learning analytics and psychological distress indicators. Finally, I will summarize our recent progress in integrating these sensing technologies with a virtual human for healthcare application.

Louis-Philippe Morency is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California (USC) and Research Scientist at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies where he leads the Multimodal Communication and Machine Learning Laboratory (MultiComp Lab). He received his Ph.D. and Master degrees from MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. His research interests are in computational study of nonverbal social communication, a multi-disciplinary research topic that overlays the fields of multimodal interaction, computer vision, machine learning, social psychology and artificial intelligence. Dr. Morency was selected in 2008 by IEEE Intelligent Systems as one of the Ten to Watch for the future of AI research. He received 6 best paper awards in multiple ACM- and IEEE-sponsored conferences for his work on context-based gesture recognition, multimodal probabilistic fusion and computational modeling of human communication dynamics. His work was reported in The Economist, New Scientist and Fast Company magazines.