Dr Chaona Chen
School of Computer Science
Lecturer in Robotics
Admissions Tutor
+44 114 222 1812
Full contact details
School of Computer Science
Regent Court (DCS)
211 Portobello
Sheffield
S1 4DP
- Profile
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Dr. Chaona Chen is currently a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Robotics at the School of Computer Science, University of Sheffield. Before joining the University of Sheffield, she worked as a Research Fellow in the School of Psychology & Neuroscience, University of Glasgow, where she was awarded the prestigious Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship (2021-2024). She also held a postdoctoral position on a European Research Council-funded project (FaceSyntax, 2017-2021). She obtained her Ph.D. and B.Sc. degrees from University of Glasgow, UK and Wuhan University, China, respectively.
- Research interests
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Her research focuses on understanding human social communication and applying this knowledge to the development of human-centred artificial intelligence and social robots. Specifically, Dr. Chen's interests include:
- Computational Modelling of Social Signals: Investigating how humans communicate with one another by mathematically modelling social signals, such as facial expressions, gaze, and body movements.
- Impact of Social and Cultural Conventions: Exploring how social and cultural conventions, as well as individual characteristics, influence the adaptation of human communicative behaviours, including cultural adaptation and social learning.
- Development of Human-Centred AI and Social Robots: Creating human-centred artificial intelligence and social robots to support the learning and training of social communication skills, particularly in contexts related to social anxiety and mental health.
- Publications
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Journal articles
- Cultural facial expressions dynamically convey emotion category and intensity information. Current Biology, 34(1), 213-223.e5.
- Testing, explaining, and exploring models of facial expressions of emotions. Science Advances, 9(6).
- Facial expressions elicit multiplexed perceptions of emotion categories and dimensions. Current Biology, 32(1), 200-209.e6.
- Distinct facial expressions represent pain and pleasure across cultures. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(43).
- Discovering cultural differences (and similarities) in facial expressions of emotion. Current Opinion in Psychology, 17, 61-66.
- Space-by-time manifold representation of dynamic facial expressions for emotion categorization. Journal of Vision, 16(8), 14-14.
- The Face is the Mirror of the Cultural Mind. Journal of Vision, 15(12), 928-928.
Conference proceedings
- Robot self-recognition via facial expression sensorimotor learning. 2023 32nd IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN) (pp 2591-2597), 28 August 2023 - 31 August 2023.
- Modelling Culturally Diverse Smiles Using Data-Driven Methods. 2023 IEEE 17th International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG) (pp 1-4), 5 January 2023 - 8 January 2023.
- Dynamic Face Movement Texture Enhances the Perceived Realism of Facial Expressions of Emotion. Proceedings of the 20th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (pp 1-3)
- Building Culturally-Valid Dynamic Facial Expressions for a Conversational Virtual Agent Using Human Perception. Proceedings of the 20th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (pp 1-3)
- Building a Generative Space of Facial Expressions of Emotions Using Psychological Data-driven Methods. Proceedings of the 20th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (pp 1-3)
- Equipping social robots with culturally-sensitive facial expressions of emotion using data-driven methods. 2019 14th IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face & Gesture Recognition (FG 2019) (pp 1-8), 14 May 2019 - 18 May 2019.
- Reverse Engineering Psychologically Valid Facial Expressions of Emotion into Social Robots. 2018 13th IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face & Gesture Recognition (FG 2018) (pp 448-452), 15 May 2018 - 19 May 2018.
Preprints
- The Brain Computes Dynamic Facial Movements for Emotion Categorization Using a Third Pathway, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
- Culturally diverse facial expression signals diminish the precision of emotion communication across cultures, Springer Science and Business Media LLC.
- Cultural facial expressions dynamically convey emotion category and intensity information. Current Biology, 34(1), 213-223.e5.
- Research group