Laurent Nguyen

Biography

I am a second year PhD student at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Electrical Engineering (EDEE). I am hosted at the Idiap Research Institute since February 2011 under the supervision of Dr. Daniel Gatica-Perez in the Social Computing Group.

Research Interest

My research is embedded in the social computing paradigm, where the goal is to develop computational methods for analyzing human behavior. In particular, I am interested in the automatic analysis of nonverbal behavior in employment interviews and its relationship with three social constructs, namely personality, hirability, and job performance. Firstly, at the level of features, I am interested in applying, adapting and developing computer vision and audio processing techniques to extract nonverbal cues. Some of these features are well-documented (e.g. speaker turns, prosody, visual activity), while others have rarely been investigated in this context (e.g. head gestures, posture, etc.). My research interests also include the construction and analysis of multimodal and relational features (e.g. nodding while speaking, mutual nods, mutual gaze, etc.). Secondly, at the level of constructs, I am interested in defining machine learning tasks (classification or regression) to infer personality, hirability, and job performance, using the extracted nonverbal cues as features. Applying and adapting existing techniques to perform these tasks are an important part of my scientific interests. Thirdly, I am investigating computational methods for the analysis of dyadic interactions in natural face-to-face interactions. This requires the use of dynamical bayesain networks to perform this task.