Artificial Intelligence and Emotion: Exploring the Next Frontier of AI at the Institute of Digital Games

Dr. Konstantinos Makantasis, post-doctoral researcher in Artificial Intelligence at the Institute of Digital Games has been awarded a prestigious Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships for his TAMED (Tensor-bAsed Machine learning towards genEral moDels of affect) project. TAMED aims to create new methods and algorithms to realise aspects of general emotional intelligence (i.e.the ability to understand and manage your own emotions and those of the people around you) , one of the core long-term goals of artificial intelligence and artificial psychology.

Using innovative machine learning techniques to develop new methods and algorithms to understand and interpret emotions

Critical factors in the award of the fellowship are the excellence of the researcher, the excellence of the institution, and how innovative the research is. TAMED is unique in its innovation to use tensor-based and preference learning models to capture general aspects of affect. The Institute has innovated the use of preference learning, publishing award-winning research as well as collaborating with industry leaders such as Ubisoft and local start-ups such as Modl.ai.

A Project for the Next Generation Affective Computing

The research uses unconventional approaches and novel methods for discovering entirely new representations of emotional manifestations. By using these representations the aim is to develop models that are capable of generalizing across different contexts, moods, personalities, social settings, and modalities of human input data which has been a huge challenge for artificial agents. Something anyone who has interacted with Alexa or Siri can attest to. The methods developed through the project will help investigate the degree to which context-free affect models are possible, consolidating research in Europe and beyond.

AI Research Excellence

As one of the top-ranked postgraduate programmes in game design, the Institute of Digital Games competes with established research powerhouses such as MIT and frequent research partner NYU. Currently the Institute is also working on using AI and games for education in their LearnML Erasmus project as well as their Com-N-Play Science project.

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