Université de Genève

The University of Geneva has 2 groups working on emotion – GERG and MIRALAB.

GERG

GERG is situated in the Department of Psychology at Geneva and led by Professor Klaus Scherer who is recognized as one of the world’s leading figures in psychological research on emotion. The members of the group (4 researchers and 8 doctoral students) work on theoretical development and empirical research in the affective sciences. They conduct research into many aspects of emotions, with special emphasis on emotion-constituent appraisal processes, expression of emotion and stress in voice and speech, facial expression of emotion, central and peripheral physiological reaction patterns, and subjective experience of emotional processes. Research methods include experimental studies in both laboratory and field settings, using emotion induction and sampling of naturalistic emotions, as well as computer-simulation approaches (modeling emotion, and computerized approaches to the analysis and synthesis of facial expression). Examples of projects related to the Humaine proposal concern the analysis of the relation between emotional experience, appraisal, and facial expression using synthetic stimuli and the mutual understanding, motivation, and problem solving in computer supported communication, collaboration, and learning.GERG has a complete set of laboratories for work on acoustics, nonverbal expression, peripheral psychophysiology, EEG, and state-of-the-art hardware and software for digital signal analysis. The group has vast experience in major funded interdisciplinary projects GERG organized the 37-country cross-cultural, interdisciplinary emotion study (ISEAR), and Klaus Scherer has been a member of EC-funded interdisciplinary projects (e.g., VeriVox) and of the interdisciplinary consortium on Organizational Learning funded by the Daimler-Benz foundation.

Klaus R. Scherer, b. 1943, study of economics/social sciences U. Cologne and London School of Economics, Diploma 1966. Ph.D. Harvard U., 1970. Assistant Prof., U. Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1970-1972. Associate Prof., U. Kiel, 1972-1973. Prof. of Psych., U. Giessen, 1973-1985 Prof. of Psych., U. Geneva, 1985 to date. Director, Laboratory for Psychological Assessment, U. Geneva. Research Interests: Emotion, stress, and coping, voice and speech technology, communication and interaction. Past and present research support from granting agencies and foundations in the US, Germany, Switzerland, and the European Community. Membership in international associations for psychology, communication, acoustics, and speech science. Honors: Academia Europea, American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Co-editor of the journal EMOTION, co-editor Affective Science series, Oxford UP. Applied work: organizational psychology, music, computer interfaces.

Susanne Kaiser, born in 1956, studied psychology at the University of Zurich where she obtained her Ph.D. in 1990. From 1990-1992 she hold a post-doctoral teaching/research position at the Psychological Institute University of Zürich, Switzerland. In 1992, she was appointed tenured assistant professor (Maître d'enseignement et de recherche) of psychology at the Emotion Research Group, University of Geneva, Switzerland. Since October 2003 she is a professor of psychology at the University of Geneva. Her teaching and research activities focus on the areas of emotion, facial expression analysis and synthesis, nonverbal communication, emotion-cognition interaction, motivational factors in collaboration, human-computer interaction, embodied agents, and stress. She is principal investigator of several research programs, financed by the Swiss National Foundation.

MIRALab

MIRALab was founded in 1989 by Professor Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann. The group is made up of more than 30 researchers, coming from many different fields -computer science, mathematics, medical field, design, architecture, fashion design, cognitive science, etc. The group is truly an interdisciplinary group, working in the field of computer graphics, computer animation and virtual worlds. Since 1992, the group has participated to more than 25 European Projects. Among them, the latest are INTERFACE (Multimodal Analysis/Synthesis System for Human Interaction to Virtual and Augmented Environments), MESH (Modelling Expressions and Shapes of Human Heads), LIFEPLUS (Innovative Revival of Life in Ancient Frescos and Creation of Immersive Narrative Spaces, Featuring Real Scenes with natural looking virtual humans), CAHRISMA (Conservation of the Acoustical Heritage by the Revival and Identification of the Sinan's Mosques Acoustics).

Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann has pioneered research into virtual humans over the last 20 years. She studied at the University of Geneva and obtained several degrees including Psychology, Biology, Chemistry, and a PhD in Quantum Physics at the University of Geneva in 1977. From 1977 to 1989, she was a Professor at the University of Montreal in Canada. In 1989, she founded MIRALab, an interdisciplinary creative research laboratory at the University of Geneva. She has published more than 200 papers, is editor-in-chief of the Visual Computer and the Journal of Visualization and Computer Animation journal. She has received several awards and recently, she has been nominated at the Swiss Academy of Technical Sciences.

Dr. Pascal Volino is a computer scientist, working at MIRAlab, University of Geneva. He is actually working on new models for cloth animation, involving versatile models for efficient simulations on situations involving high deformation, wrinkling and multilayer garments. The research is particularly focused on data structure, efficient collision detection, robust simulation and interactive cloth manipulation. His work is taking part of the several european projects, involving creation and simulation of virtual garments.