Abstract
This special issue is about a research area which is developing rapidly. Pentland gave it a name which has become widely used, ‘Social Signal Processing’ (SSP for short), and his phrase provides the title of a European project, SSPnet, which has a brief to consolidate the area. The challenge that Pentland highlighted was understanding the nonlinguistic signals that serve as the basis for “subconscious discussions between humans about relationships, resources, risks, and rewards”. He identified it as an area where computational research had made interesting progress, and could usefully make more.
Highlights
If effective progress is to be made, one of the requirements is to develop some consensus on a variety of issues that are basic to the area—obviously the topics to be covered, and terminology, the literature that people in the field are expected to know, the simplifications that are considered acceptable, and so on
Some of the reasons are superficial, such as newcomers assuming that the name defines the field rather than being a useful label for an existing body of work. Others are deeper, such as the fact that there are notoriously intractable divisions in the existing literature on social phenomena (e.g. [2]). Those divisions reflect the uncomfortable reality that social phenomena defy any single, coherent analysis, and it would be naïve to expect that the new field could transcend them
What it can do is to find a way of living with them. The aim of this special issue is to reflect the kinds of conceptual framework that are emerging in the new field
Summary
Efforts since Pentland’s paper have made it clear that it is not easy to achieve well-grounded consensus for the new area. Scherer et al develop that general framework in one direction They offer a succinct list of subject states to be identified (using terms like interested, surprised, stressed, accepting, etc.), and sources of information about them (involving talk style, revealing events, the focus of the speaker, and the dialog role)—these, for them, provide the social signals. They look in some detail at technologies that may be relevant , and develop their ideas through a detailed study of particular data. It is right and proper that the papers in the special issue should reflect different approaches It is important find ways of defining common ground. That is what SSPnet set out to do in the Declaration of Belfast, which is included here by permission of the SSPnet project members
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
