Research interests

My research interests are:

• Applying knowledge from psychology of emotion to improve artificial systems resilience and autonomy of decision, especially in collective settings.

• Synthesizing artificial cognitive processes providing artificial situated systems with abilities related to those emotion gives us.

• Improve coordination strategies among situated agents utilizing social structuration-related functions of emotion in groups.

Artificial emotion

While artificial emotion is widely studied in human-machine interaction, my main interest is in the design and implementation of artificial cognitive processes that give situated artificial systems, such as cyber-physical systems or robots, abilities that emotion gives us as humans. I’m especially interested in autonomy of decision and resilience.

Resilience

Among other abilities, emotion allows us to detect, react, and recover from unanticipated situations. Systems that are in direct interaction with the physical world and those composed of many interacting sub-systems have in common that their designers can’t foresee all situations they can encounter. Designers are therefore unable to pre-determine an adequate behavior for all possible situations. This kind of systems thus require some autonomy of decision and adaptative capabilities. To give these abilities to artificial systems we try to design and implement artificial cognitive processes that fulfill the functions emotion have in humans. Signaling unanticipated situations to other cognitive processes, triggering adaptation and re-planning phases, and initiating collective awareness are among the functions of emotion we are interested in.

EmArCoSyR project

This research topic has been explored during the EmArCoSyR research project which was supported by the french territory "Région Rhône-Alpes" through its "Pack Ambition Rechercher" program and by the "Fondation Grenoble INP" TRUST research Chair.

Self-organisation

Emotional state sharing among members of a group allow them to adapt collectively to unanticipated situations. Emotion-induced adaptations include dedicated behaviors such as helping each other and more generic reactions such as signaling to others the occurrence of unexpected situation.

Expressions associated with emotional episodes are also involved in the social structuration of groups through their influence on social bounds.