New Social Signals in a New Interaction World: The Next Frontier for Social Signal Processing

Abstract

Social signal processing (SSP) is the domain aimed at the modeling, analysis, and synthesis of social behavior, particularly the nonverbal aspects. So far, the field has focused on face-to-face interactions, where it is possible to use the whole range of nonverbal cues that people have at their disposal to communicate (i.e., gestures, facial expressions, vocalizations, and so on). However, increasingly more interactions take place through communication technologies that limit the use of nonverbal cues (e.g., phone calls do not allow one to display facial expressions) or that require the adoption of artificial cues (e.g., likes on social media). This opens a new frontier for SSP, where the main questions are: Do people still exchange social signals? And if so, how?