The PHYSTA project started on 9-1-1998, following the signing of the contract of association by all partners. The project scope is twofold. On the one hand the project will develop systematic ways for integrating subsymbolic and symbolic techniques into principled hybrid systems. On the other hand it will explore the emotion understanding problem which is important for creating intelligent human computer interaction systems.

In the first year of the project there has been significant progress in both aspects of the project, i.e., subsymbolic neural network based feature extraction and analysis as well as symbol generation on one hand, and analysis of the emotion understanding application on the other. In the former aspect, a state-of-the-art review has been performed and various extensions and theories are being developed; in the latter, a first systematic exploration of the problem has been performed, which includes many novel ideas and specific ways for the emotion understanding system implementation. Altogether, this resulted in the production of 4 main reports:

-Review of Artificial Intelligence and Neural Network Techniques for Mapping Signals to Symbol

-Review of Existing Techniques for Human Emotion Understanding and Applications in Human-Computer Interaction

-Development of Feature Representations from Emotionally coded Facial Signals and Speech

-Test Material: Format and Availability