Media Technology MSc Programme

Modeling emotional contagion based on experimental evidence for moderating factors. by René Coenen
“To date a lot of evidence has been found for the phenomenon describing the spread of emotion from one person to another called emotional contagion. Although there is a large body of research on this topic, research containing evidence for factors that moderate the process of emotional contagion, is limited and inconclusive. Furthermore most of these studies are done in a dyadic lab-setting and consequently little is known of the process of emotional contagion in groups. This study provides a review of the current available evidence regarding factors moderating the process of emotional contagion and introduces an agent-based modeling strategy that can simulate the spread of emotion among a group of agents. The model is based on the results of this review. We finally present a pilot study investigating several group contagion cases showing the flexibility and potential implications of this strategy.”

supervisor: Joost Broekens

Automatic Annotation of Cyttron Database using the NCI Thesaurus. by David Graus
“Semantic annotation uses human knowledge formalized in ontologies to enrich texts, by providing structured and machine-understandable information of its content. This paper proposes an approach for automatically annotating texts of the Cyttron Scientific Image Database, using the NCI Thesaurus ontology. Several frequency- based keyword extraction algorithms were implemented and evaluated, with the aim to extract core concepts and exclude less relevant concepts. Furthermore, topic classification algorithms were applied to identify important concepts which do not occur in the text. The algorithms were evaluated by comparing them to annotations provided by experts. Semantic networks were generated from these annotations and an ontology-based similarity metric was applied to compare them. Finally the networks were visualized to provide further insights into the differences of the semantic structure generated by humans, and the algorithms.”

supervisor: Joris Slob

Date: Thursday April 12th
Time: 15.15
Location: Gravensteen, room 011
Pieterskerkhof 6, Leiden