CyberEmotions
Encyclopedia
CyberEmotions is a large-scale integrating project funded by the European Commission
under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) in FET ICT domain theme 3: ‘Science of complex systems for socially intelligent ICT’. It started in February 2009
for a period of four years, and gathers approximately 40 scientists from Austria
, Germany
, Poland
, Slovenia
, Switzerland
, and United Kingdom
. Its main objective concerns understanding the role of collective emotions
in creating, forming and breaking-up eCommunities
.
So far, research performed within the project has helped uncovering some of the mechanisms driving eCommunities, such as negative emotion
s. It has led to the creation of several sentiment analysis
computer programs, such as SentiStrength. Additionally, data gathered from online communities –such as the BBC
message boards– have been made available to any interested researcher.
The first layer consists of research teams collecting data at a macro and micro level. For instance, eCommunities
such as MySpace
are being crawled
and text exchanges between members automatically analyzed for positive or negative emotion. At a micro level, data is gathered on human psychophysiological
responses to computer-mediated communication
(CMC). The theory layer deals with building mathematical model
s of online emotional behavior, thanks to the data collected. Finally, the ICT output layer produces computer programs which integrate the models and data, in order to study CMC. Artificial dialog systems
are for instance developed, which take into account emotional responses of the user, and respond accordingly (i.e., adapting their artificial affective state).
tweets
, or that female users of MySpace
send and receive proportionately more positive comments than males. The project fostered the development of several sentiment mining software programmes capable of retrieving the emotional valence
and arousal in text produced by web users. Several physics and network models were developed that help understand the dynamic behind variations in valence and arousal of messages posted in eCommunities. Finally, software was designed that is able to respond in an emotionally-consistent way to messages produced by users varying in emotional content.
European Commission
The European Commission is the executive body of the European Union. The body is responsible for proposing legislation, implementing decisions, upholding the Union's treaties and the general day-to-day running of the Union....
under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) in FET ICT domain theme 3: ‘Science of complex systems for socially intelligent ICT’. It started in February 2009
February 2009
February 2009 was the second month of that year. It began on a Sunday and ended after 28 days on a Saturday.Inasmuch as the month of February in non-leap years is exactly four weeks long, in years when it commences on Sunday, all western calendars designating Sunday as the first day of the week...
for a period of four years, and gathers approximately 40 scientists from Austria
Austria
Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...
, Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
, Poland
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
, Slovenia
Slovenia
Slovenia , officially the Republic of Slovenia , is a country in Central and Southeastern Europe touching the Alps and bordering the Mediterranean. Slovenia borders Italy to the west, Croatia to the south and east, Hungary to the northeast, and Austria to the north, and also has a small portion of...
, Switzerland
Switzerland
Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....
, and United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
. Its main objective concerns understanding the role of collective emotions
Group Emotion
A group of people share a range of qualities and characteristics which signifies it from other groups. One facet of the group's entity is its emotional characteristics. Just as individuals have moods, emotions and dispositional affects, Groups possess similar attributes which influence aspects such...
in creating, forming and breaking-up eCommunities
Online community
An online community is a virtual community that exists online and whose members enable its existence through taking part in membership ritual. An online community can take the form of an information system where anyone can post content, such as a Bulletin board system or one where only a restricted...
.
So far, research performed within the project has helped uncovering some of the mechanisms driving eCommunities, such as negative emotion
Emotion
Emotion is a complex psychophysiological experience of an individual's state of mind as interacting with biochemical and environmental influences. In humans, emotion fundamentally involves "physiological arousal, expressive behaviors, and conscious experience." Emotion is associated with mood,...
s. It has led to the creation of several sentiment analysis
Sentiment analysis
Sentiment analysis or opinion mining refers to the application of natural language processing, computational linguistics, and text analytics to identify and extract subjective information in source materials....
computer programs, such as SentiStrength. Additionally, data gathered from online communities –such as the BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
message boards– have been made available to any interested researcher.
Objectives
- To understand the role of collective emotionsGroup EmotionA group of people share a range of qualities and characteristics which signifies it from other groups. One facet of the group's entity is its emotional characteristics. Just as individuals have moods, emotions and dispositional affects, Groups possess similar attributes which influence aspects such...
in creating, forming and breaking-up ICT mediated communitiesOnline communityAn online community is a virtual community that exists online and whose members enable its existence through taking part in membership ritual. An online community can take the form of an information system where anyone can post content, such as a Bulletin board system or one where only a restricted...
as a spontaneous emergent behaviour occurring in complex techno-social networks. - To understand the relationship between emotionEmotionEmotion is a complex psychophysiological experience of an individual's state of mind as interacting with biochemical and environmental influences. In humans, emotion fundamentally involves "physiological arousal, expressive behaviors, and conscious experience." Emotion is associated with mood,...
s of individuals as revealed by subjective experience, behaviour, physiological responses, and expressions with online emotional behaviours of ICT mediated dyads and groups in an integrative multi-level approach. - To create decentralized adaptive tools which allow the amplification of positive or the suppression of negative collective emotionsGroup EmotionA group of people share a range of qualities and characteristics which signifies it from other groups. One facet of the group's entity is its emotional characteristics. Just as individuals have moods, emotions and dispositional affects, Groups possess similar attributes which influence aspects such...
in e-societiesOnline communityAn online community is a virtual community that exists online and whose members enable its existence through taking part in membership ritual. An online community can take the form of an information system where anyone can post content, such as a Bulletin board system or one where only a restricted...
and take into account the heterogeneity of interacting humans. - To prepare the theoretical background for the development of the next generation emotionally-intelligent ICT services using models of self-organized active agents and sociophysics methods.
Consortium
The CyberEmotions consortium is composed of approximately 40 scientists in the area of physics, engineering, computing, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and psychology. The additional business partner, Gemius SA, is an online research agency dealing with Internet market research.- Centre of Excellence for Complex Systems Research, Warsaw University of TechnologyWarsaw University of TechnologyThe Warsaw University of Technology is one of the leading institutes of technology in Poland, and one of the largest in Central Europe. It employs 2,453 teaching faculty, with 357 professors . The student body numbers 36,156 , mostly full-time. There are 17 faculties covering almost all fields of...
(Poland) - Virtual Reality Lab, École Polytechnique Fédérale de LausanneÉcole polytechnique fédérale de LausanneThe École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne is one of the two Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology and is located in Lausanne, Switzerland.The school was founded by the Swiss Federal Government with the stated mission to:...
(Switzerland) - Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group, University of WolverhamptonUniversity of WolverhamptonThe University of Wolverhampton is a British university located on four campuses across the West Midlands and Shropshire. The city campus is located in Wolverhampton city centre with a second campus at Compton Park, Wolverhampton; a third in Walsall and a fourth in Telford...
(United Kingdom) - Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Austria)
- Chair of Systems Design, ETH ZurichETH ZurichThe Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich or ETH Zürich is an engineering, science, technology, mathematics and management university in the City of Zurich, Switzerland....
(Switzerland) - Department of Theoretical Physics, Jožef Stefan InstituteJožef Stefan InstituteThe Jožef Stefan Institute , is the largest research institute in Slovenia. The main research areas are physics, chemistry, molecular biology, biotechnology, information technologies, reactor physics, energy and environment...
(Slovenia) - Emotion, Cognition, Social Context, Jacobs University Bremen (Germany)
- IKM Research Group, Berlin Institute of Technology (Germany)
- Gemius SA (Poland)
Organization
The project is divided into three layers: "data collection", "theory", and "ICT output".The first layer consists of research teams collecting data at a macro and micro level. For instance, eCommunities
Online community
An online community is a virtual community that exists online and whose members enable its existence through taking part in membership ritual. An online community can take the form of an information system where anyone can post content, such as a Bulletin board system or one where only a restricted...
such as MySpace
MySpace
Myspace is a social networking service owned by Specific Media LLC and pop star Justin Timberlake. Myspace launched in August 2003 and is headquartered in Beverly Hills, California. In August 2011, Myspace had 33.1 million unique U.S. visitors....
are being crawled
Web crawler
A Web crawler is a computer program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner or in an orderly fashion. Other terms for Web crawlers are ants, automatic indexers, bots, Web spiders, Web robots, or—especially in the FOAF community—Web scutters.This process is called Web...
and text exchanges between members automatically analyzed for positive or negative emotion. At a micro level, data is gathered on human psychophysiological
Psychophysiology
Psychophysiology is the branch of psychology that is concerned with the physiological bases of psychological processes. While psychophysiology was a general broad field of research in the 1960s and 1970s, it has now become quite specialized, and has branched into subspecializations...
responses to computer-mediated communication
Computer-mediated communication
Computer-mediated communication is defined as any communicative transaction that occurs through the use of two or more networked computers...
(CMC). The theory layer deals with building mathematical model
Mathematical model
A mathematical model is a description of a system using mathematical concepts and language. The process of developing a mathematical model is termed mathematical modeling. Mathematical models are used not only in the natural sciences and engineering disciplines A mathematical model is a...
s of online emotional behavior, thanks to the data collected. Finally, the ICT output layer produces computer programs which integrate the models and data, in order to study CMC. Artificial dialog systems
Chatterbot
A chatter robot, chatterbot, chatbot, or chat bot is a computer program designed to simulate an intelligent conversation with one or more human users via auditory or textual methods, primarily for engaging in small talk. The primary aim of such simulation has been to fool the user into thinking...
are for instance developed, which take into account emotional responses of the user, and respond accordingly (i.e., adapting their artificial affective state).
Research Results
During the first two years of the project, CyberEmotions led to the discovery of underlying emotional processes in eCommunities. For instance, it was shown that popular events (such as the Oscars) typically generate a majority of negatively valencedValence (psychology)
Valence, as used in psychology, especially in discussing emotions, means the intrinsic attractiveness or aversiveness of an event, object, or situation. However, the term is also used to characterize and categorize specific emotions. For example, the emotions popularly referred to as "negative",...
tweets
Twitter
Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...
, or that female users of MySpace
MySpace
Myspace is a social networking service owned by Specific Media LLC and pop star Justin Timberlake. Myspace launched in August 2003 and is headquartered in Beverly Hills, California. In August 2011, Myspace had 33.1 million unique U.S. visitors....
send and receive proportionately more positive comments than males. The project fostered the development of several sentiment mining software programmes capable of retrieving the emotional valence
Valence (psychology)
Valence, as used in psychology, especially in discussing emotions, means the intrinsic attractiveness or aversiveness of an event, object, or situation. However, the term is also used to characterize and categorize specific emotions. For example, the emotions popularly referred to as "negative",...
and arousal in text produced by web users. Several physics and network models were developed that help understand the dynamic behind variations in valence and arousal of messages posted in eCommunities. Finally, software was designed that is able to respond in an emotionally-consistent way to messages produced by users varying in emotional content.
See also
- Affective computingAffective computingAffective computing is the study and development of systems and devices that can recognize, interpret, process, and simulate human affects. It is an interdisciplinary field spanning computer sciences, psychology, and cognitive science...
- CyberspaceCyberspaceCyberspace is the electronic medium of computer networks, in which online communication takes place.The term "cyberspace" was first used by the cyberpunk science fiction author William Gibson, though the concept was described somewhat earlier, for example in the Vernor Vinge short story "True...
- EmotionEmotionEmotion is a complex psychophysiological experience of an individual's state of mind as interacting with biochemical and environmental influences. In humans, emotion fundamentally involves "physiological arousal, expressive behaviors, and conscious experience." Emotion is associated with mood,...
- Group emotionGroup EmotionA group of people share a range of qualities and characteristics which signifies it from other groups. One facet of the group's entity is its emotional characteristics. Just as individuals have moods, emotions and dispositional affects, Groups possess similar attributes which influence aspects such...
- Sentiment analysisSentiment analysisSentiment analysis or opinion mining refers to the application of natural language processing, computational linguistics, and text analytics to identify and extract subjective information in source materials....
External links
- CyberEmotions official website
- CyberEmotions project description, on the European Commission website
- SentiStrength, sentiment mining software developed under the CyberEmotions framework.
- Commetrix, dynamic network visualization and analysis software applied for visualizing sentiment dissemination in networks for the CyberEmotions framework.