Kostas Karpouzis

Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences · Department of Communication, Media and Culture

This paper investigates the significance of Explainable AI(XAI) in educational technologies, employing the iRead project as a case study. The iRead project, an adaptive learning technology designed to bolster language learning, demonstrates the pivotal role of explainability in fostering effective, trustworthy, and engaging learning environments. I...

The advent and abundance of mobile devices and network connectivity have provided learners of all ages with access to potentially unlimited sources of educational material, from pre-school activities to conventional and after-school courses and continuing education. One of the challenges that learners face is how to locate and access interesting co...

Artificial intelligence has evolved enormously over the last two decades, becoming mainstream in different scientific domains including education, where so far, it is mainly utilized to enhance administrative and intelligent tutoring systems’ services and academic support. ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence-based chatbot, developed by OpenAI and r...

Social Media have been extensively used for commercial and political communication, besides their initial scope of providing an easy-to-use outlet to produce and consume user-generated content. Besides being a popular medium, Social Media have definitely changed the way we express ourselves or where we look for emerging news and commentary, especia...

Social Media have been extensively used for commercial and politi-cal communication, besides their initial scope of providing an easy-to-use outlet to produce and consume user-generated content. Besides being a popular medi-um, Social Media have definitely changed the way we express ourselves or where we look for emerging news and commentary, espec...

The design process of any interactive application is an important part of its lifecycle, since it largely defines its structure, means of interaction with the users and its actual content. In the case of applications related to medical uses and self-help, it is even more important, given the aims of the application, the diversity of target users an...

This chapter outlines the relation between artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML) algorithms and digital games. This relation is two-fold: on one hand, AI/ML researchers can generate large, in-the-wild datasets of human affective activity, player behaviour (i.e. actions within the game world), commercial behaviour, interaction with grap...

Research has shown that digital game players often feel engagement and rapport with a game hero or character when they can channel their own ambitions and goals through the hero's journey in the game world; in essence, they feel a sense of accomplishment and fulfilment whenever they put the game mechanics to use to help the hero reach a positive en...

We explore novel game mechanics and techniques in the domain of gamified and game-based mobile mental health applications. By combining modern game design elements with techniques applied by practitioners (e.g., therapists) and known mechanics used in relevant games, we developed an integrated mobile game. Playtesting with a group of individuals sh...

In video games, players' perception of the game world and related information depends on their or the game designer's choice of a virtual camera model. In this paper, we attempt to answer the research question of whether it is possible to identify which camera model is preferred by, fits and best serves each player depending on where they are in a...

In their daily lives, people are confronted with situations where they need to form a schema of possible future scenarios and the likelihood of them occurring, be it about climate change, economic up- or downturn, or even the potential success of a romantic date. Be these issues of mundane or universal importance, this judgmental forecasting poses...

This chapter outlines the relation between artificial intelligence (AI) / machine learning (ML) algorithms and digital games. This relation is two-fold: on one hand, AI/ML researchers can generate large, in-the-wild datasets of human affective activity, player behaviour (i.e. actions within the game world), commercial behaviour, interaction with gr...

This paper describes the development needed to support the functional and teaching requirements of iRead, a 4-year EU-funded project which produced an award-winning serious game utilising lexical and syntactical game content. The main functional requirement was that the game should retain different profiles for each student, encapsulating both the...

Synaesthesia is a condition that enables people to sense information in the form of several senses at once. This work describes a Python implementation of a simulation of synaesthesia between listening to music and viewing a painting. Based on Scriabin's definition, we developed a deterministic process to produce a melody after processing a paintin...

Human activity recognition and analysis has always been one of the most active areas of pattern recognition and machine intelligence, with applications in various fields, including but not limited to exertion games, surveillance, sports analytics and healthcare. Especially in Human-Robot Interaction, human activity understanding plays a crucial rol...

The goal of this paper is to utilize available big and open data sets to create content for a board and a digital game and implement an educational environment to improve students’ familiarity with concepts and relations in the data and, in the process, academic performance and engagement. To this end, we used Wikipedia data to generate content for...

Gamification is increasingly employed in learning environments as a way to increase student motivation and consequent learning outcomes. However, while the research on the effectiveness of gamification in the context of education has been growing, there are blind spots regarding which types of gamification may be suitable for different educational...

Human activity recognition and analysis has always been one of the most active areas of pattern recognition and machine intelligence, with applications in various fields, including but not limited to exertion games, surveillance, sports analytics and healthcare. Especially in Human-Robot Interaction, human activity understanding plays a crucial rol...

Educators often seek ways to introduce gaming in the classroom in order to break the usual teaching routine, expand the usual course curriculum with additional knowledge, but mostly as a means to motivate students and increase their engagement with the course content. Even though the vast majority of students find gaming to be appealing and a welco...

The goal of this paper is to study whether Game-Based Learning (GBL) can be used to improve academic performance and engagement. We present an experiment based on the design and deployment of a Monopoly-like board game, in the context of a primary school Geography curriculum, and look for improvements in students’ academic performance and will to l...

This demonstration presents the design principles of the Navigo games for reading. By reflecting on our design tools and processes we explore the way theory, empirical evidence and best practice and expertise have informed our design. We look into the reciprocal role of theory and design and provide transferable lessons for design of educational te...

Human action recognition and analysis has already given life to a vast spectrum of real world applications, ranging from surveillance and human-computer interaction to patient monitoring and rehabilitation. Most action recognition systems, especially smart-home or assistive living applications, depend on network infrastructures for easy data fusion...

Die Vorstellung unterschiedlicher Möglichkeiten des Einsatzes von digitalen Spielen für soziale Inklusion bildet den Fokus dieses Artikels. In dem Zusammenhang wird beschrieben, was soziale Inklusion ist und das Potenzial von digitalen Spielen für soziale Inklusion umrissen. Anschließend werden erprobte Unterrichtsszenarien vorgestellt. Diese setze...

Exertion games form a vastly expanding field, crossing over to machine learning and user studies, with studies of qualitative traits of actions, such as the player's level of expertise. In this work, we show how simple shape descriptors based on variance features fare on such a demanding task. We formulate two variance-based features and experiment...

Human action recognition is currently one of the hottest areas in pattern recognition and machine intelligence. Its applications vary from console and exertion gaming and human-computer interaction to automated surveillance and assistive environments. In this paper, we present a novel feature extraction method for action recognition, extending the...

Identification of unintentional falls is a critical application in smart assistive environments, especially in the context of elderly care. However, visually discriminating between falls and fall-like, intentional activities is a challenging task. In this paper, we propose the utilization of a novel feature extraction scheme based on the newly form...

The advent of ubiquitous and wearable sensors and computing power and, especially, natural interfaces in the form of speech-based commands or hand-held devices enables users to interact with computers, gaming consoles, and portable devices in a human-like fashion, surpassing the conventional paradigm of keyboards, mice and hand-held controllers. Th...

A typical gaming scenario, as developed in the past 20 years, involves a player interacting with a game using a specialized input device, such as a joystick, a mouse, a keyboard or a proprietary game controller. Recent technological advances have enabled the introduction of more elaborated approaches in which the player is able to interact with the...

Affective computing researchers adopt a variety of methods in analysing or synthesizing aspects of human behaviour. The choice of method depends on which behavioural cues are considered salient or straightforward to capture and comprehend, as well as the overall context of the interaction. Thus, each approach focuses on modelling certain informatio...

Player modeling and estimation of player experience have become very active research fields within affective computing, human computer interaction, and game artificial intelligence in recent years. For advancing our knowledge and understanding on player experience this paper introduces the Platformer Experience Dataset (PED) — the first open-access...

As overaging is becoming a main societal challenge, the development of AAL (Ambient Assisted Living) systems has become the centre of many research projects the last years. Our own work is targeted towards the development of an AAL system -called CARE- that provides assistance in form of recommendations helping its users overcome typical difficulti...

Accurate identification and timely handling of involuntary events, such as falls, plays a crucial part in effective assis-tive environment systems. Fall detection, in particular, is quite critical, especially in households of lonely elderly people. However, the task of visually identifying a fall is challenging as there is a variety of daily activi...

The human face is, in essence, an advanced expression apparatus; despite its adverse complexity and variety of distinct expressions, researchers has concluded that at least six emotions, conveyed by human faces, are universally associated with distinct expressions. In particular, sadness, anger, joy, fear, disgust and surprise form categories of fa...

This paper presents an ontology that leads the player of a serious game - regarding conflict handling - to the educative experience from which they will benefit the most. It provides a clearly defined tree of axioms that maps the player’s visually manifested affective cues and emotional stimuli from the serious game to conflict handling styles and...

Estimating the focus of attention of a person highly depends on her/his gaze directionality. Here, we propose a new method for estimating visual focus of attention using head rotation, as well as fuzzy fusion of head rotation and eye gaze estimates, in a fully automatic manner, without the need for any special hardware or a priori knowledge regardi...

The articles in this special section focus on the use of emotion technology and applications in computer games.

Estimating affective and cognitive states in conditions of rich human-computer interaction, such as in games, is a field of growing academic and commercial interest. Entertainment and serious games can benefit from recent advances in the field as, having access to predictors of the current state of the player (or learner) can provide useful informa...

Recording and annotating a multimodal database of natural expressivity is a task that requires careful planning and implementation, before even starting to apply feature extraction and recognition algorithms. Requirements and characteristics of such databases are inherently different than those of acted behaviour, both in terms of unconstrained exp...

This workshop covers real-time computational techniques for the recognition and interpretation of human affective and social behaviour, and techniques for synthesis of believable social behaviour supporting real-time adaptive human-agent and human-robot interaction in real-world environments.

Machine based human action recognition has become very popular in the last decade. Automatic unattended surveillance systems, interactive video games, machine learning and robotics are only few of the areas that involve human action recognition. This paper examines the capability of a known transform, the so-called Trace, for human action recogniti...

The detection and classification of human movements, as a joint field of Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, is used with an increasing rate in applications designed to describe human activity. Such applications require efficient methods and tools for the automatic analysis and classification of motion capture data, which constitute an active...

The detection and classification of human movements, as a joint field of Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, is used with an increasing rate in applications designed to describe human activity. Such applications require efficient methods and tools for the automatic analysis and classification of motion capture data, which constitute an active...

The issue of discriminating among players’ styles and associating them with player profile characteristics, demographics and specific interests and needs is of vital importance for creating content, fine tuned and optimized in such a way that user engagement and interest are maximized. This paper attempts to address the issue of clustering players’...

Intelligent personalized systems often ignore the affective aspectof human behavior and focus more on tactile cues of the useractivity. A complete user modeling, though, should also incorporatecues such as facial expressions, speech prosody and gesture orbody posture expressivity features, in order to dynamically profile the user, fusing all availa...

Modeling and recognizing spatiotemporal, as opposed to static input, is a challenging task since it incorporates input dynamics as part of the problem. The vast majority of existing methods tackle the problem as an extension of the static counterpart, using dynamics, such as input derivatives, at feature level and adopting artificial intelligence a...

Present work deals with the incorporation of non-manual cues in automatic sign language recognition. More specifically, eye gaze, head pose, and facial expres-sions are discussed in relation to their grammatical and syntactic function and means of including them in the recognition phase are investigated. Computer vision issues related to extracting...

In this work, we explore the relation between expressive head movement and user profile information in game play settings. Facial gesture analysis cues are statistically correlated with players' demographic characteristics in two different settings, during game-play and at events of special interest (when the player loses during game play). Experim...

Confronting conflicts and coping with them is part of social life, since conflicts seem to arise in almost every context and developmental stage of human life. The personal and collective gains that follow conflict resolution have motivated scholars across many research fields to advocate the use of pro-social mechanisms for resolution. The Siren s...

Affect-sensitive systems such as social robots and virtual agents are increasingly being investigated in real-world settings. In order to work effectively in natural environments, these systems require the ability to infer the affective and mental states of humans and to provide appropriate timely output that helps to sustain long-term interactions...

This paper investigates the use of a gaze-based interface for testing simple shared attention behaviours during an interaction scenario with a virtual agent. The interface is non-intrusive, operating in real-time using a standard web-camera for input, monitoring users’ head directions and processing them in real-time for resolution to screen coordi...

This work presents the design and implementation of corpus recording sessions along with some preliminary processing results. Cap-tured modalities include speech and facial expressions but the focus is on hand gesture expressivity. Thus, this is the primary modality and is recorded using three methods: bare hands, Nintendo Wii remote controls and d...

A multimodal, cross-cultural corpus of affective behavior is presented in this research work. The corpus construction process, including issues related to the design and implementation of an experiment, is discussed along with resulting acoustic prosody, facial expressions and gesture expressivity features. However, research work presented here foc...

Affect-sensitive systems such as social robots and virtual agents are increasingly being investigated in real-world settings. In order to work effectively in natural environments, these systems require the ability to infer the affective and mental states of humans and to provide appropriate timely output that helps to sustain long-term interactions...

We propose a framework for inferring the focus of attention of a person, utilizing information coming both from head rotation and eye gaze estimation. To this aim, we use fuzzy logic to estimate confidence on the gaze of a person towards a specific point, and results are compared to human annotation. For head pose we propose Bayesian modality fusio...

Processing of recorded or real-time signals, feature extraction, and recognition are concepts of utmost important to an affect–aware and capable system, since they offer the opportunity to machines to benefit from modeling human behavior based on theory and interpret it based on observation. This chapter discusses feature extraction and recognition...

Perception and attention mechanisms are of great importance for entities situated within complex dynamic environments. With roles extending greatly beyond passive information services about the external environment, such mechanisms actively prioritise, augment and expedite information to ensure that the potentially relevant is made available so app...

Emotional intelligence is an indispensable facet of human intelligence and one of the most important factors for a successful social life. Endowing machines with this kind of intelligence towards affective human–machine interaction, however, is not an easy task. It becomes more complex with the fact that human beings use several modalities jointly...

Labelling emotion databases is not a purely technical matter. It is bound up with theoretical issues. Different issues affect labelling of emotional content, labelling of the signs that convey emotion, and labelling of the relevant context. Linked to these are representational issues, involving time course, consensus and divergence, and connections...

Current work focuses on the detection of human behavior emotional cues and their incorporation into affect aware Natural Interaction. Techniques for extracting emotional cues based on visual non verbal human behavior are presented. Namely, gesture qualitative expressivity features and head pose and eye gaze estimation are derived from hand and faci...

We present an initial demonstrator towards the creation of an adaptive serious game for teaching conflict resolution. The overall aim is the development of a game which detects and models player in-game behaviours and cognitive processes and, based on these, automatically generates content that drives the player towards personalized conflict resolu...

This paper explores, from a theoretical and technical point of view, the role of head rotation and eye gaze directionality to the human perception of attention from non-verbal cues. We have annotated two different versions of the same dataset, in order to correlate the above parameters with the degree people have considered people in the dataset pa...

Present work deals with the incorporation of non-manual cues in automatic sign language recognition. More specifically eye gaze, head pose and facial expressions are discussed in relation to their grammatical and syntactic function and means of including them in the recognition phase are investigated. Computer vision issues related to extracting ey...