Newsletter-Archiv

21.07.2024

Dear Knowledge Seekers,

we hope you had a great summer semester so far! Get ready for some exciting updates and opportunities from our lab!

Our latest news

Our research group leader Prof. Dr. Hanna Drimalla has accepted a W2 professorship in "Human-centered Artificial Intelligence" at the Faculty of Technology. In light of this new role and to better reflect our evolving research focus, our group will now be known as "Human-centered Artificial Intelligence: Multimodal Behavior Processing".
Additionally, Matthias Norden has successfully defended his doctoral thesis at the Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin. He will continue his research on digital markers of psychological conditions within the group

Our classes

Next winter semester we will offer many interesting courses: For Bachelor students, Prof. Dr. Hanna Drimalla will give a lecture (with tutorial) on “Multimodal Behavior Processing: Affective Signals”. For Graduate students, we offer a research colloquium and a journal club on „Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence“.

Our open positions

Interested in working with us? We are looking for new research assistants with strong technical skills in either machine learning, data analysis or web development. If you are interested, reach out to us.

Our projects and thesis opportunities

This semester we are offering a new project on “Deep Learning Methods for Heart Rate Estimation”. If you are interested in other topics, you can find more student projects here.
We also have many thesis opportunities for bachelor or master thesis about various topics, like analysing facial mimicry during stressed conditions or you can be part of the development of algorithms to support the diagnosis of social anxiety disorder in children. Check out our thesis opportunities here.

Our current studies

Our Dona project is about to start its next study period and you can participate by donating your anonymized messaging data soon. In another online study with Ukrainian refugees, we are investigating the digital footprint of war: here are more informations about the study.
We also have ongoing studies in our lab at CITEC: one on heart rate detection and one on individual resilience.
If you want to support the research and get some money for your efforts, you can check out all current studies here.

Our upcoming events

In September, we will be at the „Informatik Festival“ in Wiesbaden, where we will present our data donation tool Dona in a workshop. We will also be presenting our latest work at ACII 2024 (Affective Computing & Intelligent Interaction Conference) in Glasgow in September.

Our latest publications

We have just released the open-source code of Dona, our data donation platform for de- identified chat data! Along with the code, we're also sharing our first dataset „Data Donation with Dona: De-identified Messaging Data (WhatsApp and Facebook) and Evaluation Respones“, which includes 78 WhatsApp and 7 Facebook data donations.

We wish you a great summer and hope to see you in our classes next semester! 

Hanna Drimalla

PS: If you want to follow our research, you can get more updates and news on our channels on LinkedIn, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter).

16.04.2024

Dear Followers of Science,

Spring has arrived and the new summer semester is starting. 
We would like to share some fresh updates and opportunities from our lab!

Our classes

This semester, Olya Hakobyan and Matthias Norden organize the interactive Journal Club about Empathic Artificial Intelligence. The  Journal Club is about how artificial intelligence is applied to understand and respond to human inner states, such as stress, boredom or emotions.  
Here you can find an overview of our teaching.

Our project and thesis opportunities

We have different opportunities to work within our group. You can make a student project or write your bachelor or master thesis with our support. We have topics about heart rate, breathing rate and facial expression in relation to stress, human online interactions and understanding and analyzing social signals of understanding.
Here you can discover our different opportunities and topics.  

Our current studies

This month, our new study „Digital Footprint of War“ has started where we aim to identify how social interactions change as a response to armed conflict and displacement. We are looking for people from Ukraine to donate anonymized messaging data from Facebook Messenger. For your support, you will get a 10€ voucher and individual feedback of your own messaging behavior. 
Click here to sign up and participate.

At the moment we also have two lab studies at CITEC running:
The XAI project, where our goal is to investigate how understanding is communicated nonverbally in various contexts and by various people. 
And our cognitive-verbal performance study, where we aim to investigate mental stress and resilience.
If you are interested in supporting research, here you can find our studies. For your time and effort you will be rewarded.

If you don‘t have the time to come to our lab, you can participate in one of our online studies. In the project of digital social interactions, you can take part in our online study and learn more about your messaging behavior on WhatsApp, Instagram or Facebook: www.socialdatadonation.com 

Our latest papers 

Recently, we have submitted papers to ACII and ACMM.
You will hear about their acceptance via our channels on Linkedin, Instagram, and X (previous Twitter).

We wish you an inspiring summer!

Hanna Drimalla

10.10.2023

Dear Science-Lovers,

A new winter semester has started and it’s time to inform you about the latest news and opportunities from our lab!
 
Our classes

This semester we’re offering a lecture about Machine Learning and a journal club on current trends in Multimodal Behavior Processing.
An overview of all courses and also current theses and projects, you can find on our website.

Our open positions

You can become a member of our team and gain insights into our studies as research assistant. We are looking for research assistants in three different studies. If you are interested, here you can find all our open positions.

Our current studies

In the XAI project we aim to study differences between non-verbal signals of understanding in different individuals and situations.
If you want to participate, sign up for our lab study at CITEC. You receive 15€ for your time and effort. You can find more information here.

We also have two running lab studies about automatic detection of heart rate and stress at CITEC. In our ongoing online study about social interactions, we aim to better understand social interactions from data donations of anonymized messaging data.
If you want to support research and receive some money for your effort, you can check out all current studies here.

Our latest papers

Our work "On Scalable and Interpretable Autism Detection from Social Interaction Behaviour" has been awarded with the audEERING Award at ACII 2023 MIT medialab in Boston, USA. In this paper, we evaluate the capability of using videos of a standardized social interaction to differentiate non-verbal behaviors of individuals with and without Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC).
 
This summer we also published a review on XAI for audiovisual data. We pointed to a limited variety of XAI methods and lack of evaluation.
Here you can find our results and recommendations for the use of Explainable AI.

One of our Master Students presented his thesis at a conference in Norrköping, Sweden. He developed a prototype system for interactive sonification of facial behavior. For more information, klick here.

Our new channels:

LinkedIn, X (previous Twitter), Facebook or Instagram; here we are showing you insights from our lab, we inform you about our ongoing research and introduce you to our team members.
So follow us on your favorite channels!

If you have any questions, ideas, feedback or comments, please feel free to reach out to us.
We wish you a good start to the new semester.

Best wishes,

Hanna Drimalla

21.03.2023

Dear curious minds,

We're excited to kick off the new semester soon and share some updates
and news from our research group:

This summer semester, we're offering several classes that we're excited
to share with you. These include a lecture on analyzing Affective
Signals using your own data, a seminar on Explainable AI, and a
Journal Club that challenges current multimodal AI hypes. An overview of all courses and
also current theses and projects, you can find on our website.

We're actively seeking research assistants to work on a range of topics
related to XAI, stress and affect detection, nonverbal behavior, social
media data, and machine learning. These tasks involve programming, data
analysis, conducting experiments, and science communication. You can
find all open positions on our website.
If you're passionate about these areas and want to join our team, please
contact us at mbp-application@techfak.de.

We're thrilled to invite you to participate in our ongoing research
studies. We have two studies that we're currently conducting:

• Online study: By donating your Facebook or WhatsApp data, you will receive personalized visualizations and insights. This study aims to advance our understanding of social interaction. Please visit www.socialonlinedata.com to participate.
• Lab study at Bielefeld University: Participate in a challenging task while being video recorded, receive payment for your time and help us advance our understanding of resilience. To sign up for this study, please visit the study website.

We're grateful for your interest in our research, and we'd be honored if
you participated in any of our studies. As always, we welcome any
feedback or questions you may have. Feel free to reach out to us via
email, Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

We hope you have a great start to the new semester, and we look forward
to keeping you updated on our research in the future.

Best regards,
Hanna Drimalla

23.12.2022

Dear Science Enthusiasts,

we hope you have had a good year and are now looking forward to the
holidays. Here come some ideas what you could do in the next days or
even in the next year, based on what is going on in the MBP Lab:

Take part in a research study
At Bielefeld University, we are currently conducting a study to learn
more about cognitive load. If you would like to learn more about our
research and earn 30€, visit the study website,
where you can also register directly for the study.

Find your project or thesis topic
We have several new topics for thesis or student projects. They range
from explainable artificial intelligence to analysis of social media
data to analysis of gaze behavior in clinical situations. Check them out
on our website.

Work with us
Our team is constantly growing and we are looking for new motivated
research assistants (HiWis). Depending on your skills, you will assist
us with experimental studies, coding or our technical infrastructure. We
offer you an insight into our research, many learning opportunities, a
supportive environment and a good team atmosphere. If you are studying
computer science or psychology and are interested in affective
computing, explainable AI or social signal processing, just send your CV
to mbp-application@techfak.de.

Read our latest paper
Our work on "Automatic Detection of Subjective, Annotated and
Physiological Stress Responses from Video Data" has been awarded with
the Best Health AI Presentation Award at ACII 2022 in Nara, Japan, and
now been published in the conference proceedings. A copy of the accepted
version can be found here.

If you have any questions, ideas, or comments about the news, please
feel free to reach out to us. We will be back early next year with two
exciting studies on digital social dynamics and explainable AI. Until
then, we wish you a Merry Christmas and a good start to 2023.

Best wishes,
Hanna Drimalla

08.08.2022

Dear Research Enthusiasts,
there have been many exciting developments in our MBP-group over the past few weeks. We want to give you a brief overview:

New Grant

We have received new funding to research Inclusive Explainable Artificial Intelligence! Our goal is to take into account the diversity of human signals and help people of all kinds interact smoothly with machines. The project has been approved by the German Research Foundation (DFG) is part of the TRR 318 on Constructing Explainability.  

New PhD Positions

You want to work with us? We have new open PhD positions in several subfields: inclusive explainable AI, digital social dynamics, biases in electronic health records, and diversity in computational video analysis. We will post the job descriptions shortly. If you have studied computer science, data science or something similar, and are interested in any of the topics, feel free to already send us your CV.

New Papers 

To better study stress and its effects, we have developed the Digital Stress Test (DST). In our new paper in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, we present the results of the online validation study and highlight the potential of the DST as a digital stress research tool:  "Inducing and Recording Acute Stress Responses on a Large Scale With the Digital Stress Test (DST) ". The Digital Stress Test was also just featured on HERTZ87.9, the radio of Bielefeld University.

Our paper “Automatic Detection of Subjective, Annotated and Physiological Stress Responses from Video Data” has been accepted for publication at ACII 2022 in Nara, Japan in October.

New Study

We have just launched a 15-minute study on video-based heart rate monitoring at Bielefeld University, Germany. So, if you want to get some exercise, learn more about our research and get the chance to win 30€, contact us.  

We wish you a good summer with a lot of inspiration!
Your MBP-Team