Affective Computing for Education (ART/325CP)

In recent years, the education establishment has been paying more attention to students' psychological aspects and their connections to academic achievements. The emotion and affection of students are of particular interest, as many studies have established the relationship between positive emotion/affection to academic successes, while the parallel observation that negative emotion/affection would hinder academic progress also holds true. The affective states would become an invariable driver behind a student’s academic life. In this project, we will use technology to help analyze a multitude of gifted students' behavior, with the objective of identifying the cause of positive affective states. By analyzing the subjects’ facial emotions as well as the activities they undertake during learning, we would get an idea of the levels of their affective states, especially those that are crucial to academics, personal and professional growth, inter-personal relationships, etc. The affective states of our particular interest would include concentration, motivation, perseverance, engagement and self-initiative. A better understanding of these affective states and their causes would enable the education community to cultivate them in the general student population. ASTRI works in collaboration with the Hong Kong Education Bureau (EDB) in this Government-Initiated-Project. A system to analyze affective states of students will be deployed at the Hong Kong Academy of Gifted Education, EDB's subsidiary, in a pilot trial.