Queen's University

The QUB team has a strong research profile in the area of emotion and speech prosody. The team is interdisciplinary and has combined strengths in psychology and speech analysis. Members of the team have been partners in European-wide collaborative and interdisciplinary research on machine recognition of emotion and the development of emotion sensitive interfaces. They have collected one of the first, large audiovisual databases of naturally occurring emotion, and have developed sophisticated tools for tagging the perceived affect of spoken utterances. The FEELTRACE tool allows users to trace the emotional content of an interaction over time. They have also developed a speech analysis system (ASSESS) which delivers a statistical analysis of relevant properties of the speech signal. The team have developed techniques for inducing emotion-related states, and have well-equipped laboratories, including a driving simulator which is used to induce emotional states (stress, boredom etc), and equipment for relevant physiological measurement. Their research has been funded under the Fifth and Sixth EU Frameworks (in the projects PHYSTA, ORESTEIA and ERMIS).

Roddy Cowie was born in 1950. He studied Philosophy and Psychology at Stirling and UCLA as an undergraduate, and received his PhD from Sussex on relationships between human and machine vision. He was appointed lecturer in the psychology department at Queen’s, Belfast in 1975, senior lecturer in 1991, and professor in 2003. He has continued to work on the relationship between computational modelling and visual phenomena where people’s subjective experience conflict with ‘rational’ expectations, including impossible objects, misperception of motion, reading errors, and recovery of structure from simple pictures. Research on another of these phenomena, ‘speechreading’, led to an academic and practical interest in deafness, particularly the subjective experience of deafness, and the way it deafness affects speech. With Dr E Douglas-Cowie (QUB), he explored computational methods of analysing deafened people’s speech. These generalised to other speech varieties that convey information about the speaker – varieties associated with social class, mental disorder, ‘phone voice’, and expressive reading. His recent work, arising from EC collaborations with J Taylor (KCL), S Kollias (NTUA) and others, has focussed on the perception of emotion, where both verbal and visual cues function to convey intensely subjective experiences.

Ellen Douglas-Cowie born 1951, graduated with a BA in English Studies from the New University of Ulster (1972). Following graduation she shifted focus to Linguistics and worked on a sociolinguistic topic for her D.Phil (Ulster 1980). She became a lecturer in Linguistics (based in the School of English) at Queen’s University Belfast, Senior Lecturer in 1991, Professor (2003), Head of School (1992-2003) and Dean of Faculty (2003-). Her research studies the characteristics that distinguish varieties of speech – clinical, social and stylistic – and includes seminal papers on sociolinguistics and deafened speech. Since 1980 she has worked with Dr R. Cowie and has focused on prosodic issues (pitch patterns, timing, loudness). She has recognised expertise in two key areas. The first is phonetic and acoustic analysis of prosody. The second area of expertise is filedwork, particularly the collection of data. She has worked on 4th and 5th Framework projects (PHYSTA and ERMIS) which work towards the identification and recognition of emotion from speech and face, and has co-edited a recent special edition of Speech Communication on ‘Speech and Emotion’(2003).

Michael Alcorn (b. 1962) studied at the University of Ulster, and completed a PhD in composition at the University of Durham. He was appointed Composer-in-Residence at Queen's in 1989 and in 1990 was appointed to the post of Lecturer in Music in 1990, Senior Lecturer in 1997 and Professor in 2002. In 1994-95 he was on sabbatical leave to CCRMA (Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics), Stanford University, California and more recently was carrying out research work in granular synthesis at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver. Dr Alcorn's compositional activities range from music for conventional instruments to works for live or taped electro-acoustic performance. His music has been performed and broadcast in the UK, Europe, North and South America, and the far East. He is Director of SARC (the Sonic Arts Research Centre)at Queen's and is particularly active as a promoter of new musical technologies, exploring technology that allows the range of musical expression to be extended.

Ian Sneddon born 1952, graduated with BSc in Psychology in 1974 followed by a PhD in Animal Social Behaviour, both from St Andrews University. He is currently a senior lecturer in the School of Psychology, Queen’s University Belfast. Research interests revolve around trying to gain an understanding of animal welfare – particularly in farm animals. Current research focuses on: recognition of emotional states in animals, use of cognition/emotion as indicators of stress/poor welfare in animals, research on nature and stability of temperament in animals. Recent UK research funding includes DEFRA. Associate Fellow of British Psychological Society, Member Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour and Universities Federation for Animal Welfare.