DevEmo—Software Developers’ Facial Expression Dataset

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the relevance of remote activities and digital tools for education, work, and other aspects of daily life. This reality has highlighted the need for emotion recognition technology to better understand the emotions of computer users and provide support in remote environments. Emotion recognition can play a critical role in improving the remote experience and ensuring that individuals are able to effectively engage in computer-based tasks remotely. This paper presents a new dataset, DevEmo, that can be used to train deep learning models for the purpose of emotion recognition of computer users. The dataset consists of 217 video clips of 33 students solving programming tasks. The recordings were collected in the participants’ actual work environment, capturing the students’ facial expressions as they engaged in programming tasks. The DevEmo dataset is labeled to indicate the presence of the four emotions (anger, confusion, happiness, and surprise) and a neutral state. The dataset provides a unique opportunity to explore the relationship between emotions and computer-related activities, and has the potential to support the development of more personalized and effective tools for computer-based learning environments.