Hatice Gunes is a Turkish computer scientist who is Professor of Affective Intelligence & Robotics at the University of Cambridge. Gunes leads the Affective Intelligence & Robotics Lab. Her research considers human robot interactions and the development of sophisticated technologies with emotional intelligence.
Early life and education
Gunes was an undergraduate student at the Yıldız Technical University.[citation needed] She moved to the University of Technology Sydney for her doctoral research, where she was awarded the Australian Government International Postgraduate Research Scholarship (IPRS) to focus on vision and machine learning based analysis of affective face and upper body behaviour.[1][2] Her doctoral research showed that affective face and body displays are simultaneous but not strictly synchronous; explicit detection of temporal phases (onset-apex-offset) can improve the accuracy of affect recognition; recognition from fused face and body modalities performs better than that from the face or the body modality alone; and synchronized feature-level fusion achieves better performance than decision-level fusion.[3] She created the Bimodal Face and Body Gesture Database (FABO), a collection of labelled videos of posed, affective face and body displays for automatic analysis of human nonverbal affective behavior.[4] After earning her doctorate, she was appointed an Australian Research Council postdoctoral fellow, and worked on airport and railway security through object human tracking.[citation needed] In 2008, Gunes moved to Imperial College London, where she worked alongside Maja Pantić in the Intelligent Behaviour Understanding Group (iBUG).[5][6] The project looked to build a dialogue system that can interact with humans via a virtual character.[7]
Gunes was appointed President of the Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing in 2017. She is interested in how technologies can enhance a sense of wellbeing, through affective VR, autonomous and tele-presence social robotics.[11]
Hatice Gunes; Massimo Piccardi (12 August 2008). "Automatic temporal segment detection and affect recognition from face and body display". IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics. 39 (1): 64–84. doi:10.1109/TSMCB.2008.927269. ISSN1083-4419. PMID19068431. WikidataQ51860563.