Deep Learning models, applied to a sensor-based Human Activity Recognition task, usually require vast amounts of annotated time-series data to extract robust features. However, annotating signals coming from wearable sensors can be a tedious and, often, not so intuitive process, that requires specialized tools and predefined scenarios, making it an expensive and time-consuming task. This paper combines one of the most recent advances in Self-Supervised Leaning (SSL), namely a SimCLR framework, with a powerful transformer-based encoder to introduce a Contrastive Self-supervised learning approach to Sensor-based Human Activity Recognition (CSSHAR) that learns feature representations from unlabeled sensory data. Extensive experiments conducted on three widely used public datasets have shown that the proposed method outperforms recent SSL models. Moreover, CSSHAR is capable of extracting more robust features than the identical supervised transformer when transferring knowledge from one dataset to another as well as when very limited amounts of annotated data are available.

In Audio-Video Emotion Recognition (AVER), the idea is to have a human-level understanding of emotions from video clips. There is a need to bring these two modalities into a unified framework, to effectively learn multimodal fusion for AVER. In addition, literature studies lack in-depth analysis and utilization of how emotions vary as a function of time. Psychological and neurological studies show that negative and positive emotions are not recognized at the same speed. In this paper, we propose a novel multimodal temporal deep network framework that embeds video clips using their audio-visual content, onto a metric space, where their gap is reduced and their complementary and supplementary information is explored. We address two research questions, (1) how audio-visual cues contribute to emotion recognition and (2) how temporal information impacts the recognition rate and speed of emotions. The proposed method is evaluated on two datasets, CREMA-D and RAVDESS. The study findings are promising, achieving the state-of-the-artperformance on both datasets, and showing a significant impact of multimodal and temporal emotion perception.

Estimating affective and cognitive states in conditions of rich human-computer interaction, such as in games, is a field of growing academic and commercial interest. Entertainment and serious games can benefit from recent advances in the field as, having access to predictors of the current state of the player (or learner) can provide useful information for feeding adaptation mechanisms that aim to maximize engagement or learning effects. In this paper, we introduce a large data corpus derived from 58 participants that play the popular Super Mario Bros platform game and attempt to create accurate models of player experience for this game genre. Within the view of the current research, features extracted both from player gameplay behavior and game levels, and player visual characteristics have been used as potential indicators of reported affect expressed as pairwise preferences between different game sessions. Using neuroevolutionary preference learning and automatic feature selection, highly accurate models of reported engagement, frustration, and challenge are constructed (model accuracies reach 91%, 92%, and 88% for engagement, frustration, and challenge, respectively). As a step further, the derived player experience models can be used to personalize the game level to desired levels of engagement, frustration, and challenge as game content is mapped to player experience through the behavioral and expressivity patterns of each player.