School of Psychology

• Cognition, Emotion and Communication
• Social signals
• Cross-cultural emotion perception
• Evolution of human communication and language
• Risk perception and communication
• Opinion dynamics
• Cognitive modelling
• Agent based modeling

Recent Publications, Conferences and Reports

Dr Gary McKeown's Full Publication List

Cowie, R., McKeown, G., & Douglas-Cowie, E. (In Press) Tracing Emotion: An Overview. International Journal of Synthetic Emotions, 3(1), 1-17

Gormley, G., Sterling, M., Menary, A. & McKeown, G. (In Press) Keeping it real: Enhancing realism in simulated patient OSCE stations. The Clinical Teacher

McKeown, G., Cowie, R., Curran, W., Ruch, W., & Douglas-Cowie, E. (2012) ILHAIRE Laughter Database. Eighth international conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC) Istanbul, Turkey

Ochs, M., Brunet, P., McKeown, G., Pelachaud C., & Cowie, R. (2012) Smiling Virtual Characters Corpora. Eighth international conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC) Istanbul, Turkey

M. McRorie, I. Sneddon, G. McKeown, E. Bevacqua, E. de Sevin and C. Pelachaud (In Press ) Building and Evaluating Personality in Virtual Agents. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/T-AFFC.2011.38

Marc Schroder, Elisabetta Bevacqua, Roddy Cowie, Florian Eyben, Hatice Gunes, Dirk Heylen, Mark ter Maat, Gary McKeown, Sathish Pammi, Maja Pantic, Catherine Pelachaud, Bjorn Schuller, Etienne de Sevin, Michel Valstar, Martin Wollmer, (In Press) "Building Autonomous Sensitive Artificial Listeners," IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, IEEE computer Society Digital Library. IEEE Computer Society, http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/T-AFFC.2011.34

Gary McKeown, Michel Valstar, Roddy Cowie, Maja Pantic, Marc Schroder, (2012) "The SEMAINE Database: Annotated Multimodal Records of Emotionally Coloured Conversations between a Person and a Limited Agent," IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, Vol 3(1) IEEE computer Society Digital Library. IEEE Computer Society, http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/T-AFFC.2011.20 (link)

Ian Sneddon, Margaret McRorie, Gary McKeown, Jennifer Hanratty, (2012) "The Belfast Induced Natural Emotion Database," IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, Vol 3(1) IEEE computer Society Digital Library. IEEE Computer Society, http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/T-AFFC.2011.26 (link)

Björn Schuller, Michel Valstar, Florian Eyben, Gary McKeown, Roddy Cowie, and Maja Pantic (2011) AVEC 2011 – The First International Audio/Visual Emotion Challenge 1st International Audio/Visual Emotion Challenge and Workshop. Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII 2011).

Cowie, R., & McKeown, G. (2011). Evaluating a computer system that converses fluently with people. Irish Ergonomics Review 2011

Schröder, M., Pammi, S., Gunes H., Pantic, M., Valstar, M., Cowie, R., McKeown, G., Heylen, G., ter Maat, M., Eyben, F., Schuller, B., Wollmer, M., Bevacqua, E., Pelachaud C., de Sevin E. (2011) Come and Have an Emotional Workout with Sensitive Artificial Listeners! 9th IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition

Sneddon I, McKeown G, McRorie M, Vukicevic T, (2011) Cross-Cultural Patterns in Dynamic Ratings of Positive and Negative Natural Emotional Behaviour. PLoS ONE 6(2): e14679. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0014679 (link)

Cowie, R., Douglas-Cowie, E., Sneddon, I., McRorie, M., Hanratty, J., McMahon, E., & McKeown, G. (2010). Induction techniques developed to illuminate relationships between signs of emotion and their context, physical and social. In K. R. Scherer, T. Banziger, & E. Roesch (Eds.), A Blueprint for Affective Computing: a Sourcebook and Manual (p. 295 -307). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cowie, R., & McKeown, G. (2010). Statistical analysis of data from initial labelled database and recommendations for an economical coding scheme. Available from http://www.semaine-project.eu/

Cowie, R., Gunes, H., McKeown, G., Vaclavu-Schneider, L., Armstrong, J., & Douglas-Cowie, E. (2010). The emotional and communicative significance of head nods and shakes in a naturalistic database. In Proceedings of LREC international workshop on emotion (pp. 42–46). [link]

G. McKeown, M. F. Valstar, R. Cowie, and M. Pantic, (2010) "The SEMAINE corpus of emotionally coloured character interactions," in Proceedings of the IEEE Int'l Conf. Multimedia & Expo (ICME'10), pp. 1079-1084 [link]

Schroeder M. and McKeown, G., (2010) "Considering Social and Emotional Artificial Intelligence," in Proc. AISB 2010 Symposium, Leicester, UK. [link]

Schroeder, M., Pammi, S., Cowie, R., McKeown, G., Gunes, H., Pantic, M., et al. (2010). Demo: Have a chat with sensitive artificial listeners. In Proceedings of the AISB 2010 symposium ”towards a comprehensive intelligence test”. Leicester, United Kingdom. [link]

McKeown, G., Dorahy, M. & Mulholland, C. (2010) Does the link between dissociation and cognitive inhibition in dissociative identity disorder generalize to other conditions characterised by traumatic dissociation: A study of Troubles-related PTSD. European Society for Trauma and Dissociation, International Conference

P. Brunet, G McKeown, R. Cowie, H.Donnan, E.Douglas-Cowie (2009) Social Signal Processing: What are the relevant variables? And in what ways do they relate? IEEE International Workshop on Social Signal Processing 2009 (published IEEE) vol. 1 pp 77-82 [link]

R. Cowie G. McKeown C. Gibney The challenges of dealing with distributed signs of emotion: theory and empirical evidence Proceedings ACII 2009 (published IEEE) vol. 1 pp 351-356 [link]

Trew, K., Muldoon, O., McKeown, G., & McLaughlin, K. (2009). The media and memories of conflict in Northern Ireland. Journal of Children & Media, 3(2), 185–203. [link]

Computational Models and Software

ContResT –  An R package designed to facilitate the manipulation and analysis of continuous response trace style data, in particular that produced by the FEELtrace suite of programs.

SEMAINE project – Currently working with the SEMAINE project which aims to build a Sensitive Artificial Listener, a multimodal dialogue system in which a virtual character sustains a conversational interaction with a user by reacting with appropriate verbal and nonverbal communicative social signals http://www.semaine-project.eu/

Opinion Dynamics – an agent based model that examines the dynamics of opinion change in social networks under the influence of the mass media.

Semspace – creates a semantic representation from a corpus of textual knowledge.

Semneigh – finds the nearest neighbours to a given word or phrase in a semantic space created by semspace.

Semgraph – creates a graph of the semantic neighbourhood of a given word or phrase in a semantic space created by semspace.

QUESTOR-CAT a web based project offering software tools to aid to industry and business in their communication of risk issues.

Research grants

2011: EU Framework 7: Incorporating laughter into human-avatar interactions: Research and evaluation (ILHAIRE) (link)

2009: Wellcome Trust Engaging Science Society Awards (£121,836) "Genetics, Risk and Lifestyle - can I blame it on my genes?" with W5 and QUB - Centre of Excellence for Public Health

2007: Invest NI Compete award (£17,250)

2004 – 2007: CAST Studentship (£50,000) examining risk communication and emotion within organizations.

2001 – 2004: Invest Northern Ireland (£350,000) QUESTOR Environmental Tools

Affiliations and other information

Chartered Psychologist of the British Psychological Society (CPsychol)

Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education Teaching (PGCHET)

Affiliated with the QUESTOR centre

Member of HUMAINE (Human-Machine Interaction Network on Emotion).

Certified FACS coder