Abstract: Computer analysis of human behavior is an interdisciplinary endeavor combining sensing technology, theoretical and empirical models of human behavior, pattern recognition and machine learning algorithms, and interaction sciences. The applications in this area range widely, from robotics to healthcare, from smart environments to multimedia, from security to humanitarian response. While human behaviors span different time scales, approaches to its analysis share significant methodological tools. In this talk, I will summarize some of our past research on multimodal analysis of affective and social signals, and describe a number of new projects that can bring potential collaborations about, including new databases we have collected from Alzheimer’s patients, bipolar patients, and children undergoing play therapy. I will also briefly describe our recent big data challenge on Syrian refugees in Turkey, whereby an entire year’s mobile CDR data from one million customers are opened to the research community for human mobility analysis.

Bio: Albert Ali Salah is an associate professor of computer engineering at Boğaziçi University, Turkey, and a designated associate professor at Future Value Creation Reseach Center at Nagoya University, Japan. He has co-authored over 150 publications on pattern recognition, multimodal interfaces, and computer analysis of human behavior. Albert has received the inaugural EBF European Biometrics Research Award (2006), Boğaziçi University Foundation’s Award of Research Excellence (2014), and the BAGEP Award of the Science Academy (2016). He serves as a Steering Board member of ACM ICMI, as an associate editor of IEEE Trans. on Cognitive and Developmental Systems, IEEE Trans. Affective Computing, and Int. Journal on Human-Computer Studies, and as the Chair of the Data for Refugees Challenge (D4R – http://d4r.turktelekom.com.tr) Organization Committee. He is a senior member of IEEE, and a member of ACM.

Homepage: http://www.cmpe.boun.edu.tr/~salah