For our 2023 competition, 12 teams (50 researchers) competed to see who can best use measures of physiology to model moment-to-moment ratings of two elementary components of emotional experience: feelings of valence and arousals.

Challenge details will be (a) reviewed at 2023 Affective Computing + Intelligence Interaction Conference workshop in September, and (b) described in a forthcoming manuscript co-authored by the teams and the competition organizers.

Competition Overview

Competitor Selection

Teams (or individuals) were eligible to participate in the competition if they (1) had significant experience in machine learning, and (2) were affiliated with an academic institution. We sought to invite up to 15 teams to participate in the initiative.

Database Distribution

Teams used a small dataset to examine how well moment-to-moment, continuous ratings of valence and arousal could be modeled using 8 physiological features (e.g., ECG, EDA, RSP, and EMG).

tools

Model Testing and Open Science

To examine how well models perform when exposed to different people and emotion contexts, teams validated their models (1) across time, (2) across subjects, (3) across emotion categories, and (4) across stimuli.

Results Dissemination

Teams were invited to submit short papers describing their approach to an accepted workshop at the 2023 ACII Conference. They are now working on a collaborative paper describes the competition results, limitations, and future directions.


Competition participants

Top-performing teams

  • First place: Monica Perusquia-Hernandez, Xin Wei, Huakun Liu, Felix Dollack, Chirag Raman, Hideaki Uchiyama, and Kiyoshi Kiyokawa

  • Second place: Guangyi Zhang and Ali Etemad

  • Third place: Tomas D’Amelio, Nicolás Bruno, Leandro Bugnon, Federico Zamberlan, and Enzo Tagliazucchi

Other teams

  • Linying Ji, Christopher Crawford, Yuqi Shen, Yanling Li, Young Won Cho, Xiaoyue Xiong, Zachary Fisher, and Sy-Miin Chow

  • Saurabh Hinduja, Maneesh Bilalpur, Liza Vimalkumar Jivnani, and Shaun Canavane

  • Shubham Pandey, Rushi, Sharanyak Podder, and Arpit Upadhyay

  • Kieran McVeigh, Alessia Iancarelli, and Yiyu Wang

  • Huynh Van Thong, Vu Ngoc Tu, and Kim SooHyung

  • Ziqing Yang, Houwei Cao

  • Hugo Posada-Quintero, Fernando Marmolejo-Ramos, Javier Pinzón-Arenas, Luis Mercado-Díaz, Carlos Barrera-Causil, Jorge Ivan Padilla, Raydonal Ospina, and Julian Tejada

  • Kleanthis Avramidis

  • Isabel M. Berwian, Jamie C. Chiu, Dan-Mircea Mirea, Erik C. Nook, Henna Vartiainen, and Claire Whiting

Competition organizers

  • Nicholas A. Coles (Stanford University, USA)

  • Maciej Behnke (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland)

  • Bartosz Perz (Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, Poland)

  • Stanisław Saganowski (Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, Poland)