This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction, ACII 2007, held in Lisbon, Portugal, in September 2007.

The 57 revised full papers and 4 revised short papers presented together with the extended abstracts of 33 poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 151 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on affective facial expression and recognition, affective body expression and recognition, affective speech processing, affective text and dialogue processing, recognising affect using physiological measures, computational models of emotion and theoretical foundations, affective databases, annotations, tools and languages, affective sound and music processing, affective interactions: systems and applications, as well as evaluating affective systems.

This volume contains the proceedings of the 1st International Conference on A?ective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII 2005) held in Beijing, China, on 22-24 October 2005. Traditionally, the machine end of human-machine interaction has been very passive, and certainly has had no means of recognizing or expressing a?ective information. But without the ability to process such information, computers cannot be expected to communicate with humans in a natural way. The ability to recognize and express a?ect is one of the most important features of - man beings. We therefore expect that computers will eventually have to have the ability to process a?ect and to interact with human users in ways that are similar to those in which humans interact with each other. A?ective computing and intelligent interaction is a key emerging technology that focuses on m- iad aspects of the recognition, understanding, and expression of a?ective and emotional states by computers. The topic is currently a highly active research area and is receiving increasing attention. This strong interest is driven by a wide spectrum of promising applications such as virtual reality, network games, smart surveillance, perceptual interfaces, etc. A?ective computing and intelligent interaction is a multidisciplinary topic, involving psychology, cognitive science, physiology and computer science. ACII 2005 provided a forum for scientists and engineers to exchange their technical results and experiences in this fast-moving and exciting ?eld. A total of 45 oral papers and 82 poster papers included in this volume were selected from 205 c- tributionssubmittedbyresearchersworldwide.

According to Rosalind Picard, if we want computers to be genuinely intelligent and to interact naturally with us, we must give computers the ability to recognize, understand, even to have and express emotions. The latest scientific findings indicate that emotions play an essential role in decision making, perception, learning, and more-that is, they influence the very mechanisms of rational thinking. Not only too much, but too little emotion can impair decision making. According to Rosalind Picard, if we want computers to be genuinely intelligent and to interact naturally with us, we must give computers the ability to recognize, understand, even to have and express emotions. Part 1 of this book provides the intellectual framework for affective computing. It includes background on human emotions, requirements for emotionally intelligent computers, applications of affective computing, and moral and social questions raised by the technology. Part 2 discusses the design and construction of affective computers. Although this material is more technical than that in Part 1, the author has kept it less technical than typical scientific publications in order to make it accessible to newcomers. Topics in Part 2 include signal-based representations of emotions, human affect recognition as a pattern recognition and learning problem, recent and ongoing efforts to build models of emotion for synthesizing emotions in computers, and the new application area of affective wearable computers.