ANASID · Analysing Social Interactions at a Distance

The aim of this research is to begin more concrete attempts to automatically analyse social behaviour from a distance as a tool for surveillance monitoring and also the understanding of the use of public spaces. The work brings together the disciplines of social psychology and computational modelling with future work leading towards possible collaborations with architectural design and sociological research. To the applicant's knowledge, there have been no studies of social interactive behaviour during conversations from distant sensors from a plan view perspective (at least 10 metres above those being observed). This study would concentrate in particular on modelling rapport and interest within social groups from both a static and dynamic perspective, testing with video-only data while training on audio-visual data. Concretely, the following studies would be carried out: * Identifying self-arranged social groups . * Who is speaking and when? * Measuring dominance and interest in self-arranged social groups.