Investigating Context Awareness of Affective Computing Systems: A Critical Approach

Intelligent Human Computer Interaction systems should be affective aware and Affective Computing systems should be context aware. Positioned in the cross-section of the research areas of Interaction Context and Affective Computing current paper investigates if and how context is incorporated in automatic analysis of human affective behavior. Several related aspects are discussed ranging from modeling, acquiring and annotating issues in affectively enhanced corpora to issues related to incorporating context information in a multimodal fusion framework of affective analysis. These aspects are critically discussed in terms of the challenges they comprise while, in a wider framework, future directions of this recently active, yet mainly unexplored, research area are identified. Overall, the paper aims to both document the present status as well as comment on the evolution of the upcoming topic of Context in Affective Computing.