QoMEX 2013

Special Session Organizers: Katrien De Moor (iMinds-MICT, Ghent University), Robert Schleicher (Quality and Usability Lab, TU-Berlin), and Jan-Niklas Antons (Quality and Usability Lab, TU-Berlin).

Over the last years, the influence of emotions has increasingly gained importance in research on quality perception and Quality of Experience (QoE). Here, the focus has been broadened from a rather narrow, utility-oriented view to also include more hedonic and non-instrumental aspects, which means that more emphasis is put on affective states, their relation to human perception and judgment and their relation to QoE (as an outcome, a feature or an influencing factor). As a consequence, physiological measures for detecting and characterizing emotions are increasingly used as a complement to standardized subjective testing approaches. However, as the number of studies in that area is limited, the opportunities and limitations, promises and pitfalls of such measures for QoE are still unclear.

The main objective of this session is to allow researchers in that domain to present their experiences with different setups and studies focusing on human affect using physiological measurements and/or self-report measures in order to foster discussion on current problems and future research.

Katrien De Moor holds a Master’s degree in Social Sciences: option Communication Sciences from Ghent University (2005). She is affiliated to the research group for Media & ICT (iMinds-MICT-Ghent University). Katrien has broad research interests and has worked on different aspects of user involvement in innovation research. Her main research activities are however situated in the domain of user-centered Quality of Experience. Mid December 2012, Katrien received her PhD degree from Ghent University in 2012, with her thesis entitled ‘Are engineers from Mars and users from Venus? Bridging gaps in Quality of Experience research: reflections on and experiences from an interdisciplinary journey’. In the COST Qualinet project, Katrien is leading the WP2 task force on Emotional State.

Robert Schleicher joined the Telekom Innovation Laboratories as a senior research scientist in November 2006. He received his diploma in psychology in 2003 (University of Bonn) and had been working at the department of clinical psychology at the University of Cologne, workgroup biological psychology, since then. From summer 2005 to 2006 he was additionally employed at the department of clinical and applied psychology at the University of Bonn where he held classes in biological psychology and maintained the psychophysiological lab. In 2008, he finished his PhD thesis on psychophysiology, eye movements and emotions at the University of Cologne.

Jan-Niklas Antons joined the Telekom Innovation Laboratories as a research scientist in January 2009 to pursue his PhD. He received his diploma in psychology in 2008 from the Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany and has been doing research at the Quality and Usability Lab at the Technische Universität (TU) Berlin, since then. His research interests are in Quality-of-Experience evaluation and its physiological correlates with an emphasis on speech transmissions and human-machine-interaction, including neural processing of multimodal interaction. During summer 2012 he was visiting researcher at MuSAE Lab (INRS-EMT), Canada where examined neural correlates of quality perception for complex speech signals.