School of Psychology

Research Fellow

Research Interests

Cognition and emotion, cross-cultural emotion perception, social signal processing, evolution of human communication and language, risk perception and communication, implicit learning, opinion dynamics, cognitive modelling, agent based modeling.

Skip to Gary McKeown's Publications

YouTube videos from the SEMAINE project

The Semaine project aims to build a SAL, a Sensitive Artificial Listener, a multimodal dialogue system which can:

1. Create credible interactions between humans and a virtual character
2. sustain an interaction with a user for some time
3. react appropriately to the user's non-verbal behaviour

Interaction 1 (Spike - Angry)

Interaction 2 (Obadiah - Sad)

Interaction 3 (Spike - Angry)

Interaction 4 (Obadiah - Sad)

 

Recent Publications, Conferences and Reports

McKeown, G., & Sneddon, I. (In Press). Modelling continuous self-report measures of perceived emotion using generalized additive mixed models. Psychological Methods

McKeown, G. (2013). The Analogical Peacock Hypothesis: The Sexual Selection of Mind-Reading and Relational Cognition in Human Communication. Review of General Psychology [Link]

McKeown, G., Curran, W., Kane, D., McCahon, R., Griffin, H., McLoughlin, C., & Bianchi-Berthouze, N. (2013). Human Perception of Laughter from Context-free Whole Body Motion Dynamic Stimuli. Paper presented at Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII 2013), Geneva, Switzerland. [Link]

Griffin, H., Aung, M., Romera-Paredes, B., McKeown, G., Curran, W., McLoughlin, C., & Bianchi-Berthouze, N. (2013). Laughter Type Recognition from Whole Body Motion. Paper presented at Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII 2013), Geneva, Switzerland. [Link]

Niewiadomski, R., Hofmann, J., Urbain, J., Platt, T., Wagner, J., Piot, B., Cakmak, H., Pammi, S., Baur, T., Dupont, S., Geist, M., Lingenfelser, F., McKeown, G., Pietquin, O., & Ruch, W. (2013). Laugh-aware virtual agent and its impact on user amusement. In Proceedings of the 2013 international conference on Autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. (pp. 619-626). ACM. [Link]

McKeown, G., Curran, W., McLoughlin, C., Griffin, H., & Bianchi-Berthouze, N. (2013). Laughter Induction Techniques Suitable for Generating Motion Capture Data of Laughter Associated Body Movements. In 2nd International Workshop on Emotion Representation, Analysis and Synthesis in Continuous Time and Space (EmoSPACE) In conjunction with the IEEE Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). [Link]

Cowie, R., McKeown, G., & Douglas-Cowie, E. (2012) Tracing Emotion: An Overview. International Journal of Synthetic Emotions, 3(1), 1-17 [Link]

Gormley, G., Sterling, M., Menary, A. & McKeown, G. (2012) Keeping it real: Enhancing realism in simulated patient OSCE stations. The Clinical Teacher, 9, p. 382-386 [Link]

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 [Link]

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 [Link]

M. McRorie, I. Sneddon, G. McKeown, E. Bevacqua, E. de Sevin and C. Pelachaud (2012) Building and Evaluating Personality in Virtual Agents. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing 3, 3, p. 311-322 http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/T-AFFC.2011.38 [Link]

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, 3, 2, p. 165-183 http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/T-AFFC.2011.34 [Link]

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) p5-17 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) 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). [Link]

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]

McKeown, G., Trew, K., Muldoon, O.T., & McLaughlin, K. (2008) Dimensions of religious and national identity among adolescents in the border area of Ireland. 15th General Meeting of the European Association of Experimental Social Psychology. Opatija, Croatia.

McKeown, G. (2008). Computational Modelling in the Social Sciences: Parallels with Cognitive Science. Institute of Political Science, National Sun Yat-Sen University. Khaosiung, Taiwan. Invited Speaker.

McKeown, G. (2008) Modelling Mass Media & Polarisation in Opinion Dynamics.International Conference of International Political Economy & Computational Approaches. Khaosiung, Taiwan. Invited Speaker

Trew, K., Muldoon, O., McKeown, G., & McLaughlin, K. (2008). Dimensions of religious and national identity among irish adolescents growing up in two jurisdictions. 9th Annual Meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

Dunleavy, S., McKeown, G. & Sneddon, I. (2007) Perceived risk and recall for risk information in induced emotional states. Society for Risk Analysis - Europe Conference.

McKeown, G. (2007) The Classification of Emotional Texts using Weighted Latent Semantic Analysis Semantic Spaces. Proceedings of the British Psychological Society, Vol 15, No 2.

McKeown, G. & Dorahy, M. (2007) A connectionist exploration of inhibition and negative priming in flanker task performance. Proceedings of the British Psychological Society, Vol 15, No 2.

Muldoon, O., McKeown, G., McLaughlin, K & Trew, K. (2007) Implicit and Explicit personal and collective self-esteem and religious and national self-categorisation.

Dunleavy, S., Sheehy, N. & McKeown, G. (2006) The Effect of Emotions on Perceptions of Risk. Proceedings of the British Psychological Society, Vol 14, No 2.

McKeown, G. (2006) The Representation of Expert Semantic Knowledge using Latent Semantic Analysis. Proceedings of the British Psychological Society, Vol 14, No 2.

Sheehy, N., Forsythe, A., & McKeown, G. (2006) The relationship between consumer sentiment and media accounts of consumer issues. Proceedings of the British Psychological Society, Vol 14, No 2.

Trew, McLaughlin, Muldoon & McKeown, G. (2006) Adolescents’ Perceptions of National Identification and Socialisation: An Essay Study. Proceedings of the British Psychological Society, Vol 14, No 2.

McKeown, G. & Sheehy, N. (2006). 'Mass Media and Polarisation Processes in the Bounded Confidence Model of Opinion Dynamics'. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 9(1) http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/9/1/11.html.

McKeown, G. & Sheehy, N. (2005). Visualising Textual Knowledge about Risks to Aid Risk Communication. In Gavriel Salvendy (ed.), Human Computer International 2005, Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc.

McKeown, G. & Sheehy, N. (2004). An agent-based model of opinion dynamics. Proceedings of the British Psychological Society, Vol 3, No 2, p 206.

Sheehy, N., Wylie, J. &  McKeown, G. (2002).  Quantifying Risk Amplification Processes.  Health and Safety Executive: HMSO.

Sheehy, N., Wylie, J. & McKeown, G. (1999).  Quantifying amplification processes:  Genetically modified food - a case example.  Paper presented at HSE workshop on Social Amplicification of Risk, Cumberland Lodge, Windsor, September 1999.

McKeown, G. & McGuinness, C. (1995) Implicit learning in process control tasks: The effects of covariation. Proceedings of the British Psychological Society, Vol 3, No 2, p 147.

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

Staff

• Academic Staff
• Teaching Fellows
• Computer Laboratory Supervisors
• Honorary Staff
• Research Staff
• Visiting Researchers
• Support Staff