Georgios Yannakakis's paper "The Ordinal Nature of Emotions" was named as Best Paper at the Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction - ACII in San Antonio, Texas.
The paper tackles arguably one of the most fundamental tasks for affective computing: the challenging task of representing everyday emotional states computationally.
Standard practice in emotion annotation is to ask humans to assign an absolute value of intensity to each emotional behavior they observe. Psychological theories and evidence from multiple disciplines including neuroscience, economics and artificial intelligence, however, suggest that the task of assigning reference-based (relative) values to subjective notions is better aligned with the underlying representations than assigning absolute values.
Evidence also shows that we use reference points, or else anchors, against which we evaluate values such as the emotional state of a stimulus; suggesting again that ordinal labels are a more suitable way to represent emotions. This paper draws together the theoretical reasons to favor relative over absolute labels for representing and annotating emotion, reviewing the literature across several disciplines.
P. Lopes, G. N. Yannakakis, and A. Liapis, “RankTrace: Relative and Unbounded Affect Annotation,” in Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII), 2017
E. Camilleri, G. N. Yannakakis, and A. Liapis, “Towards General Models of Player Affect,” in Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII), 2017
Professor Georgios Yannakakis is the director of the Institute of Digital Games.