Marcin Skowron (Ph.D.)

Research Scientist @ Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Interaction Technologies Group

Research Interests:

Affective Computing, Human-Computer Interactions, Natural Language Processing, Affective Dialogue Systems, Information Extraction, Knowledge Acquisition, Commonsense Knowledge

Projects

I am currently involved in FP7 FET project CYBEREMOTIONS: Collective emotions in Cyberspace, leading a work-package on affective interactive tools, i.e., affective dialog systems.
[overview] [project website]

Previous projects
• RASCALLI - Responsive Artificial Situated Cognitive Agents that Live and Learn on the Internet - European Commission FP-6 Cognitive Systems Programme
  [overview] [project website]
• SEMPRE - Semantically Aware Profiling for Recommenders, FFG programe
  [overview]
• SELP - `Advanced Knowledge Technologies: Grounding, Fusion, Applications`, FFG programe
• Research projects at Hokkaido University: Question Answering - Web Based QA, Interactive QA; KnowY - Commonsense Knowledge Retrieval System
  

Activities

• Organizer:
  
  • CyberEmotions - Collective Emotions in Cyberspace Workshop
    Venue: Vienna, Austria, 18-20 January, 2012.
    
• Program Committee Member:
  
  • 13th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents - IVA 2013,
    Venue: Edinburgh, UK, 29-31 August 2013.
    
  • AISB/IACAP World Congress 2012 - Alan Turing 2012, Symposium on Linguistic and Cognitive Approaches To Dialog Agents LaCATODA 2012
    Venue: Birmingham, UK, 2 - 6 June 2012.
    
  • COST 2102 International Training School - Cross Modal Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication
    Venue: Dresden, Germany, February 21-26 2011.
    
  • Summer School "ENGAGE" - Immersive and Engaging Interaction with VH on Internet.
    Venue: Zermatt, Switzerland. September 13-15, 2010.
    
  • COST 2102 International Conference on Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication and Enactment: The Processing Issuess
    Venue: Budapest, Hungary, September 7-10 2010.
    
  • The Thirty Sixth Annual Convention of the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour AISB 2010, Symposium on Linguistic and Cognitive Approaches To Dialog Agents LaCATODA 2010
    Venue: Leicester, UK, 29th March - 1st April 2010.
    

Membership

• International Society for Research on Emotion, HUMAINE Association, International Communication Association, European Network for the Advancement of Artificial Cognitive Systems, Interaction and Robotics.
  

Press Coverage, Talks

• Interview: Polish Radio Program 3, 8.2.2013, "Checking the spelling? Check emotions too" |article and podcast|
  
• Press release: Garas, A., Garcia, D., Skowron, M., Schweitzer, F., (2012). "Soziales Verhalten trotz Anonymitaet", ETH Life - Science |press release|
• Talk: Skowron, M., Rank, S., Theunis, M. (2012). "Affect Listeners @CyberEmotions", COSI-ICT: Action for the Science of Complex Systems and Socially Intelligent ICT, Brussels 2012.
• Symposium: Kappas, A., Chung, C.K, Skowron, M., Thelwall, M., (2011). "Getting to the heart of the digital: Automatic analysis of affect in online communication" at the International Communication Association's 61st Annual Conference (ICA) in Boston.
• Talk: Skowron, M., Rank, S., (2011). "CyberEmotions: the good, the bad, the neutral - effect of an affective profile in dialog system-user online conversations", Emotions in Cyberspace - Models and Empirical Approaches at the International Society for Research on Emotion conference in Kyoto.
• Interview: Polish Press Agency, Science in Poland, 6.12.2011, "Spotkanie przedstawicieli świata nauki i biznesu w Brukseli" |article|
  
• Interview: Radio Oesterreich 1, Dimensionen - Magazin, 15.04.2011 - "Emotionen im Internet" |podcast|
  
• Interview: CliniCum Medical Journal 3/2009 - CyberEmotions: "Gefuehle im virtuellen Raum verstehen" |interview|
  
• Symposium: Kappas, A., Skowron, M., Thelwall, M., Holyst, J. (2009). Symposium together with with Agneta Fischer: "CYBEREMOTIONS: Collective emotions in cyberspace pose challenges to emotion research and theory" at the International Society for Research on Emotion (ISRE) conference in Leuven.

Demonstrations, Exhibition

• CyberEmotions project exhibition, Affect Listeners demonstration: Innovation Convention 2011. Polish Research Projects - Under the Patronage of the Polish Presidency, Brussels, Belgium, 5-6 Dec. 2011.
• Affect Listeners demonstration: Mid-term Flagship Conference. Warsaw, Poland, 24-25 Nov. 2011.
• CyberEmotions - Collective Emotions in Cyberspace: The European Future Technologies Conference and Exhibition 2011. Budapest, Hungary, 4-6 May, 2011.

Publications

• Stefan Rank, Marcin Skowron, David Garcia
  "Dyads to groups: modeling interactions with affective dialog systems"
  International Journal of Computational Linguistics Research, Volume: 4 , Issue: 1 (2013)
  

• Mike Thelwall, Kevan Buckley, George Paltoglou, Marcin Skowron, David Garcia, Stephane Gobron, Janusz Holyst
  "Damping Sentiment Analysis in Online Communication: Discussions, Monologs and Dialogs"
  CICLing 2013, part II, LNCS 7817
  

• Antonios Garas, David Garcia, Marcin Skowron, Frank Schweitzer
  "Emotional persistence in online chatting communities"
  Scientific Reports 2, 402, Nature Publishing Group, (2012)
  |article| |supplementary information| |data set|

• Bosiljka Tadic, Vladimir Gligorijevic, Marcin Skowron
  "Directed Networks of Online Chats: Content-Based Linking and Social Structure"
  8th International Conference on Signal-Image Technology and Internet-Based Systems, SITIS 2012.
  (Naples, Italy, November 26-29, 2012)
  |paper|

• Vladimir Gligorijevic, Marcin Skowron, Bosiljka Tadic
  "Structure and stability of online chat networks built on emotion-carrying links"
  Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, (2012)
  |abstract and figures| |article| |data set|

• Vladimir Gligorijevic, Marcin Skowron, Bosiljka Tadic
  "Evolving Topology on the Network of Online Chats"
  Proceedings of European Conference on Complex Systems - ECCS 2012.
  (Brussels, Belgium, Sept. 3-7, 2012)
  

• Brigitte Krenn, Stephanie Schreitter, Marcin Skowron
  "Sex differences in the evaluation of and communication with conversational agents"
  XXI Biennial International Conference on Human Ethology
  (Vienna, Austria, August 13-17, 2012)
  |abstract|

• Marcin Skowron, Stefan Rank
  "Affect Listeners - From dyads to group interactions with affective dialog systems"
  AISB/IACAP World Congress 2012 - Alan Turing 2012, Symposium on Linguistic and Cognitive Approaches To Dialog Agents - LaCATODA 2012
  (Birmingham, UK, June 2-6, 2012)
  |paper|

• Julian Sienkiewicz, Marcin Skowron, Georgios Paltoglou, Janusz Holyst
  "Entropy-growth-based model of emotionally charged online dialogues"
  Advances in Complex Systems
  arXiv:1201.5477 (2012)
  |abstract| |article|

• Marcin Skowron, Stefan Rank, Mathias Theunis, Julian Sienkiewicz
  "The good, the bad and the neutral: affective profile in dialog system-user communication"
  Proceedings of the fourth bi-annual Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction Conference - (ACII 2011), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp. 337-346, (2011).
  (Memphis, Tennessee, USA, Oct. 9-12, 2011)
  |paper|

• Marcin Skowron, Mathias Theunis, Stefan Rank, Anna Borowiec
  "Effect of affective profile on communication patterns and affective expressions in interactions with a dialog system"
  Proceedings of the fourth bi-annual Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction Conference - (ACII 2011), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp. 347-356, (2011).
  (Memphis, Tennessee, USA, Oct. 9-12, 2011)
  |paper|

• Stephane Gobron, Junghyun Ahn, Quentin Silvestre, Daniel Thalmann, Stefan Rank, Marcin Skowron, Georgios Paltoglou, Michael Thelwall
  "An Interdisciplinary VR-architecture for 3D chatting with non-verbal communication"
  Proceedings of Joint Virtual Reality Conference of EuroVR - EGVE 2011.
  (Nottingham, UK, Sept. 20-21, 2011)
  |paper|

• Julian Sienkiewicz, Marcin Skowron, Georgios Paltoglou, Janusz Holyst
  "Model of emotional dialogues based on entropy model"
  Proceedings of European Conference on Complex Systems - ECCS 2011.
  (Vienna, Austria, Sept. 12-16, 2011)
  

• Junghyun Ahn, Anna Borowiec, Kevan Buckley, et al.
  "CYBEREMOTIONS - Collective Emotions in Cyberspace"
  Proceedings of the 2nd European Future Technologies Conference and Exhibition 2011 - FET 11, Procedia Computer Science, (7), 2011.
  (Budapest, Hungary, May 4-6, 2011)
  |article|

• Marcin Skowron, Hannes Pirker, Stefan Rank, Georgios Paltoglou, Junghyun Ahn, Stephane Gobron
  "No peanuts! Affective Cues for the Virtual Bartender"
  Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth International FLAIRS Conference, AAAI Publications, pp. 117-122
  (Palm Beach, FL, USA, 18-20, May 2011)
  |paper|

• Antonios Garas, David Garcia Becerra, Frank Schweitzer, Marcin Skowron
  "Emotional communication patterns in online chat communities"
  Cyberemotions: Emotions in Cyberspace - Models and Empirical Approaches at the International Society for Research on Emotion (ISRE) conference in Kyoto.
  (Kyoto, Japan, 26-29 July, 2011)
  

• Marcin Skowron
  "Talking with affective dialog systems: Extending the analysis of affect in online communication"
  Getting to the heart of the digital: Automatic analysis of affect in online communication, International Communication Association's 61st Annual Conference.
  (Boston, MA, USA, 26-30 May, 2011)
  

• Georgios Paltoglou, Stephane Gobron, Marcin Skowron, Mike Thelwall and Daniel Thalmann
  "Sentiment analysis of informal textual communication in cyberspace"
  proceedings of ENGAGE 2010, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, State-of-the-Art Survey, pp.13-25, Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
  (Zermatt, Switzerland, Sept.13 - Sept.15, 2010)
  |paper|

• Marcin Skowron
  "Affect Listeners. Acquisition of Affective States by means of Conversational Systems"
  Development of Multimodal Interfaces - Active Listening and Synchrony, COST 2102 Int. Training School 2009, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 5967, pp. 169--181. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
  (Dublin, Ireland, March 23-27, 2009)
  |paper|

• Brigitte Krenn, Marcin Skowron, Gregor Sieber , Erich Gstrein, Joerg Irran
  "Adaptive Mind Agent"
  9th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, IVA 2009
  (Amsterdam, The Netherlands, September 14-16, 2009)
  

• Marcin Skowron, Hannes Pirker, Stefan Rank
  "CYBEREMOTIONS: Interactive computer tools for acquiring data on individual and collective emotions of online communities"
  Symposium "CYBEREMOTIONS: Collective emotions in cyberspace pose challenges to emotion research and theory" at ISRE 2009
  (Leuven, Belgium, August 6-8, 2009)
  

• Christian Eis, Marcin Skowron, Brigitte Krenn
  "Virtual Agent Modeling in the RASCALLI Platform"
  Performance Metrics for Intelligent Systems Workshop (PerMIS08, USA, August 19-21, 2008)
  |paper| - available at the Rascalli publication page

• Marcin Skowron, Joerg Irran, Brigitte Krenn
  "Computational Framework for and the Realization of Cognitive Agents Providing Intelligent Assistance Capabilities"
  European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI2008), The 6th International Cognitive Robotics Workshop, pp 88-96 (2008).
  (Patras, Greece, July 21-2, 2008)
  |paper|

• Joerg Irran, Gregor Sieber, Marcin Skowron, Brigitte Krenn
  "Acquisition and Exchange of Knowledge - From Real to Virtual Embodiment"
  In Proceedings of the Symposium on Language and Robots. 10-12 December 2007, Universidade de Avairo, Portugal
  |poster| |paper|
  

• Marcin Skowron, Kenji Araki
  "Effectiveness of Combined Features for Machine Learning Based Question Classification"
  Special Issue on Question Answering and Text Summarization
  Journal of Natural Language Processing, Vol. 6, pp. 63-83, 2005
  Information Processing Society of Japan
  (Work partially supported by Grant from Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, Strategic Information and Communications R&D Promotion Programme (SCOPE))
  |article|

• Marcin Skowron
  "A Web Based Approach to Factoid and Commonsense Knowledge Retrieval"
  Doctoral Dissertation, Hokkaido University, 2005
  

• Marcin Skowron, Kenji Araki
  "Voluntary Contributions of Unaware Internet Users? On Automatic Knowledge Retrieval from the WWW"
  AAAI 2005 Spring Symposium, Knowledge Collection from Volunteer Contributors (KCVC05)
  (Palo Alto, California, March 21-23, 2005)
  |paper|

• Marcin Skowron, Kenji Araki
  "Can I also have a question, please? On Perspectives of Interactive Clustering-driven Question-Answering"
  2005 Joint Convention Record, The Hokkaido Chapters of the Institutes of Electrical and Information Engineering.
  (Sapporo, Japan)
  |paper|
   The Winner of IEEE Sapporo Branch Student Paper Contest 2005  

• Marcin Skowron, Kenji Araki
  "Automatic Knowledge Retrieval from the Web"
  Intelligent Information Systems 2005. New Trends in Intelligent Information Processing and Web Mining
  (Gdansk, Poland, June 13-16, 2005)
  (Award from International Information Science Foundation)
  |paper|

• Marcin Skowron, Kenji Araki
  "Learning the Query Generation Patterns"
  International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics CICLing-2005, Lecture Notes in Computer Science,
  (Mexico City, Mexico, February 13-19, 2005)
  |paper|
   Best Poster Award(3rd Place)  

• Marcin Skowron, Kenji Araki
  "Evaluation of the New Feature Types for Question Classification with Support Vector Machines"
  Proceedings of International Symposium on Communications and Information Technologies 2004 (ISCIT 2004)
  (Sapporo, Japan, October 26-29, 2004)
  

• Marcin Skowron, Kenji Araki
  "Basic Idea of the Knowledge Retrieval System"
  2004 Joint Convention Record, The Hokkaido Chapters of the Institutes of Electrical and Information Engineering
  (Hakodate, Japan, October 24, 2004)
  

• Marcin Skowron, Kenji Araki
  "What Can Be Learned from Previously Answered Questions? A Corpus-Based Approach to Question Answering"
  Intelligent Information Systems 2004. New Trends in Intelligent Information Processing and Web Mining, Institute of Computer Science of the Polish Academy of Sciences, pp.379-387
  (Zakopane, Poland, May 17-20, 2004)
  |paper|

• Marcin Skowron, Kenji Araki
  "Basic Idea of Corpus-Supported Approach to Question-Answering"
  2003 Joint Convention Record, The Hokkaido Chapters of the Institutes of Electrical and Information Engineering, pp. 296-297
  (Sapporo, Japan, October 18-19, 2003)
   The Winner of IEEE Sapporo Branch Student Paper Contest 2003  

Symposiums/Workshops:

• Marcin Skowron, Stefan Rank
  "Interactive Dialogue Systems and Beyond - Interacting with Collective Emotions in E-communities"
  CyberEmotions - Final Conference
  (Warsaw, Poland, January 29-30, 2013)
  

• Marcin Skowron and Georgios Paltoglou
  "Affect Bartender - Affective Cues and Their Application in a Conversational Agent"
  Workshop on Affective Computational Intelligence, IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence 2011
  (Paris, France, April 12-15, 2011)
  |paper|

• Marcin Skowron
  "Effect of an Affective Profile in Dialog System-User Conversations "
  CYBEREMOTIONSWORKSHOP: Emergent Emotions on the Web
  (Ljubljana, Slovenia, January 20-21, 2011)
  

• Brigitte Krenn, Joerg Irran, Gregor Sieber, Marcin Skowron
  "Virtual Butlers! A technology so close and so far! Insights from the RASCALLI project"
  Workshop on Virtual Butlers - 2008
  (Vienna, Austria, 26.-27. Sept. 2008)
  

• Marcin Skowron, Kenji Araki
  "What is Hidden on the Web? On Perspectives of the Statistically Based Estimation of the Web Content"
  Language Processing Conference, NLP2006
  (Yokohama, Japan, March 14-17, 2006)
  

• Yatsumoto Kimura, Kenji Ishida, Hirotaka Imaoka, Fumito Masui, Marcin Skowron, Rafal Rzepka, Kenji Araki
  "Three Systems and One Verifier - HOKUM's Participation in QAC3 of NTCIR-5"
  Proceedings of NTCIR-5 Workshop Meeting, pp. 402-408
  (Tokyo, Japan, December 6-9, 2005)
  

• Marcin Skowron, Kenji Araki
  "New Features for the Question Classification Using Support Vector Machines"
  IPSJ SIG Technical Reports, pp.139-144
  (Sapporo, Japan, July 15-16, 2004)
  

Forthcoming:

• Marcin Skowron, Stefan Rank
  "Interacting with Collective Emotions in e-Communities"
  In Von Scheve C., Salmela M. (eds.): Collective Emotions, Oxford University Press
  

• Vladimir Gligorijevic, Milovan Suvakov, Marcin Skowron, Bosiljka Tadic
  "Patterns of Online Chats with Emotional Bots: Data Analysis and Agent-Based Simulations"
  

Data

The data are freely available for research purposes. If you make use of this dataset, please cite.

• EFNET IRC-20 Channels
  This dataset is provided as Supplementary Information for the article: "Emotional persistence in online chatting communities" by A. Garas, D. Garcia, M. Skowron, F. Schweitzer. Scientific Reports 2, 402, (2012)
  
  

• IRC Ubuntu [2004-2005-2006] [2008-2009]
  This dataset is provided as Supplementary Information for the articles:
  * V. Gligorijevic, M. Skowron, B. Tadic, "Structure and stability of online chat networks built on emotion-carrying links", Physica A, 2012
  * B. Tadic, V.Gligorijevic and M. Skowron, "Directed Networks of Online Chats: Content-Based Linking and Social Structure", ECCS 2012