I have been mentioned in a recent article posted in the blog of the “Scientific American”, where I have been asked to give my opinion about the role of context in the recognition of the emotions and, more in general, in the understanding of human behaviour:
The article provides a very extensive account of the available opinions about the matter and it confirms how elusive the concept of context is. Any persona that has been working in technology for at least a decade has certainly passed through successive waves of “context-aware” or “context-sensitive” approaches, but the meaning of the word context remains overall uncertain. The blog post of the Scientific American tries to shed some light by asking a large number of experts what they think about and the result is highly instructive. From my point of view, the most important aspects are the interplay between the analysis of context and the application of multimodal technologies on one side and, on the other side, the increasingly growing amount of information that can be gathered through the pervasive network of sensors and technologies that constellates out life.
Alessandro Vinciarelli 