ICCV Daily 2021 - Thursday

publication. We can also apply it to human-robot interaction. We have a Furhat robot named Alfie, and we created a dialogue where you can ask these kinds of questions, and you can get answers. We can also use this knowledge as a way of preventing toxic text generation from language models. So that we can guide it. How are you communicating with the robot? We created a small application, a small interaction. You don’t need to code. You can ask the robot, and you get the answer basically. My other research is about facial expressions, how we can understand facial behavior and how we can use it. In the context of this robot, we are training it to make the robot express emotions, depending on the question that we ask. This human- robot interaction, this social dialogue, is not my main research. It’s the application of what we are doing with the language models. We wanted an easy, user-friendly interface, rather than just a Google assistant or code. So if the robot breaks one day, you are not going to cry? [ laughs ] No! I’m not doing anything in that direction. There are a lot of researchers working on that social part though. What do you like about this research? For that, I need to explain my other research because I spent most of my years on that. My main research area is facial behavior understanding. You know it as facial expression recognition, but I’m always using that phrase because it’s more complicated than that. I have a minor degree in psychology from my Bachelor’s degree. I’m pretty interested in psychology. I’m also working with cognitive scientists, so I’m really interested in the interdisciplinary aspect of it as well. Why emotions? I think it’s a little bit personal as well. I always find emotions fascinating. It takes a lifetime to understand our own emotions. I can go deep into the science 21 DAILY ICCV Thursday Cigdem Turan “ I just took the chances that came my way! ”