Konstantinos Drossos

Current affiliation: Principal Scientist, Audio Machine Learning, NOKIA Technologies, Espoo, Finland.

Proclamation date: 09-09-2015

THESIS SUMMARY

Audio channel is one the two most common communication channels. Through hearing, humans perceive different information regarding their environs, can receive knowledge that another human communicates to them or can entertain their selfs. The concept that speech and music can convey emotions to the listener is common to experts and non-experts. But, these two types of audio stimuli, i.e. speech and music, are just a portion of the total amount of sounds that a man can hear. There is another type of sound stimulus, termed as general sounds or sound events, that occupy a bigger proportion of the total sound stimuli that we receive. Published works have shown that sound events can convey emotions to their listener, but they do not offer a relationship between the conveyed emotion and the technical characteristics of the sound events or any extra information that the latter can communicate. Due to the general nature of the sound events, if a relationship between the technical characteristics and the conveyed emotion is proven then is very possible that this characteristics can have a similar or same effect on emotions when the audio stimulus is speech or music. This fact will allow a higher level research focused on the effect of the sound's technical characteristics on emotions. Thus, this thesis focus on the emotion recognition from sound events. It examines and presents results with respect to the effect of rhythm, energy and semantic content of a sound event and source's spatial position on the listener's emotional state. Results portray that rhythm is a technical characteristic that affects listener's emotional state with all types of audio stimuli, whether energy is not. In addition, the source's spatial position can alter the conveyed emotion by a sound event.

Konstantinos Drossos was born in 1982, Thessaloniki, Greece. He has graduated from the Dept. of Technology of Sound and Musical Instrument, Technological Educational Institute of Ionian Islands, where he received prize for his cademic achievements and was entitled to read the grauation vow. He also holds an MSc from the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research, University of Southampton. He received his PhD in 2015 from the Dept. of Audiovisual Arts, Ionian University, with thesis title: “Emotional Information Retrieval from Sound Events”. He has worked as adjuncted lecturer in the Dept. of Technology of Sound and Musical Instrument, Technological Educational Institute of Ionian Islands, with autonomous teaching of the modules “Acoustic Design with Computers”, “Psychoacoustics”, “Sound Coverage of Events” and “Music Technology in Education”. He has published over 20 research papers and participated in five (5) research and development projects. Finally, during his PhD was a member of the Lab. of Audiovisual Signal Processing, Dept. of Audiovisual Arts, and his research interests are focused on emotion recognition from sound events, sound events recognition, sound interfaces, sound perception and audio processing.

Publications list [during the preparation of the thesis]

PUBLICATIONS IN INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC JOURNALS
[1] Drossos, K., Floros, A., Kermanidis, K.-L., “Evaluating the Impact of Sound Events’ Rhythm Characteristics to Listener’s Valence”, Journal of Audio Engineering Society, Vol. 63, No. 3, pp. 139-153, 2015
[2] Drossos, K., Floros, A., Giannakoulopoulos, A., Kanellopoulos, N., “Investigating the Impact of Sound Angular Position on the Listener Affective State”, IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 27-42, 2015
[3] Psarras, V., Floros, A., Drossos, K., Strapatsakis M., “Emotional Control and Visual Representation Using Advanced Audiovisual Interaction”, International Journal of Arts and Technology, Vol. 4, No. 4, 2011, pp. 480 – 498

PUBLICATIONS IN INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC CONFERENCES
[1] Drossos, K., Zormpas, N., Giannakopoulos, G., Floros, A., “Accessible Games for Blind Children, Empowered by Binaural Sound”, to be presented in the 8th Pervasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments (PETRA) Conference, Jul. 1 - 3, Corfu, Greece, 2015.

[2] Revis, L., Drossos, K., Floros, A., Dimitriadis, Ath., Valavanis, P., Bringiotti, Dimopoulos, N., “Investigation of Correlation of Prosody with the Possible Presence or not of Mental Illness”, Fifth Panhellenic Psychiatric Conference on Primary Health Care, Jan. 22–25, Nafplio, Greece, 2015.

[3] Drossos, K., Floros, A., “Investigation of the Possibility of Mapping Emotional Information from Audio to Visual Channel”, in proceedings of the 7th National Conference Acoustics 2014, Oct. 20–21, Thessaloniki, Greece, 2014.

[4] Kaliakatsos–Papakostas, M., Floros, A., Drossos, K., Koukoudis, K., Kuzalas, M., Kalantzis, A., “Swarm Lake: A Game of Swarm Intelligence, Human Interaction and Collaborative Music Composition”, in proceedings of the Joint Conference ICMC/SMC 2014, Sep. 14–20, Athens, Greece, 2014.

[5] Drossos, K., Floros, A., Potirakis, S., Tatlas, N.A., Tuna, G., “A socially- intelligent multi-robot service team for in-home monitoring”, in proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Information, Intelligence, Systems and Applications (IISA 2014), Jul. 9–7, Chania, Greece, 2014.

[6] Drossos, K., Floros, A., Giannakoulopoulos, A., “BEADS: A Dataset of Binaural Emotionally Annotated Digital Sounds”, in proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Information, Intelligence, Systems and Applications (IISA 2014), Jul. 9–7, Chania, Greece, 2014.

[7] Drossos, K., Floros, A., Kanellopoulos, N., “A Loudness-based Adaptive Equalization Technique for Subjectively Improved Sound Reproduction”, in proceedings of the Audio Engineering Society (AES) 136th convention, Apr. 26– 29, Berlin, Germany, 2014.

[8] Drossos K., Koukoudis K, Floros, A, “Gestural User Interface for Audio Multitrack Real-time Stereo Mixing”, in proceedings of the 8th Conference on Interaction with Sound - Audio Mostly 2013, Sept. 18 - 20, Piteå, Sweden, 2013

[9] Drossos K., Kotsakis R., Kalliris G., Floros A., “Sound Events and Emotions: Investigating the Relation of Rhythmic Characteristics and Arousal”, in proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Information, Intelligence, Systems and Applications (IISA 2013), Jul. 10 - 12, Piraeus, Greece, 2013

[10] Drossos K., Kotsakis R., Pappas P., Kalliris G., Floros A., “Investigating Auditory Human-Machine Interaction: Analysis and Classification of Sounds Commonly Used by Consumer Devices”, in proceedings of the 134th Audio Engineering Society Convention, May 4 - 7, Rome, Italy, 2013

[11] Mimilakis I. S., Drossos K., Floros A., Katerlos D. T. G., “Automated Tonal Balance Enhancement for Audio Mastering Applications”, in proceedings of the 134th Audio Engineering Society Convention, May 4 - 7, Rome, Italy, 2013

[12] Katerelos D. T. G., Drossos K., Kokkinos A., Mimilakis S. J., “iReflectors - Intelligent Reflectors from Composite Materials”, in proceedings of the Acoustics 2012 National Conference, Oct. 8 - 10, Corfu, Greece, 2012

[13] Drossos, K., Floros, A., Kanellopoulos, N. - K., “Affective Acoustic Ecology: Towards Emotionally Enhanced Sound Events”, in proceedings of the 7th Conference on Interaction with Sound - Audio Mostly 2012, Sept. 26 - 28, Corfu, Greece, 2012

[14] Drossos, K., Mimilakis, S. I., Floros, A., Kanellopoulos, G. N., “Stereo Goes Mobile: Spatial Enhancement for Short-distance Loudspeaker Setups”, in proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Intelligent Information Hiding and Multimedia Signal Processing (IIHMSP), Jul. 18 - 20, Piraeus, Greece, 2012

[15] Drossos K., Floros A., Agavanakis K., Tatlas N. A. and Kanellopoulos N. G., “Emergency Voice/Stress - level Combined Recognition for Intelligent House Applications”, in proceedings of the 132nd Audio Engineering Convention, Apr. 26 - 29, Budapest, Hungary, 2012

[16] Kokkinis E., Drossos K., Tatlas N. A., Floros A., Tsilfidis A. and Agavanakis K., “Smart microphone sensor system platform”, in proceedings of the 132nd Audio Engineering Society Convention, Apr. 26 - 29, Budapest, Hungary, 2012

[17] Grigoriou, N., Floros, A., Drossos, K., “Binaural Mixing Using Gestural Control Inter- action”, in proceedings of the 5th Conference on Interaction with Sound - Audio Mostly 2010, Sept. 15 - 17, Piteå, Sweden, 2010

[18] Vlamos, P., Floros, A., Giannakos, M. N., Drossos, K., “Towards an Interactive e- Learning System Based on Emotion and Affective Cognition”, in proceedings of the International Conference on Information Communication Technologies and Education (ICICTE), Jul. 8 - 10, Corfu, Greece, 2012, pp 367 – 376

PUBLICATIONS IN BOOKS CHAPTERS AND VOLUMES
[1] Drossos, K., Kaliakatsos-Papakostas, M., Floros, A., “Affective Audio Synthesis for Sound Experience Enhancement”, Experimental Multimedia Systems for Interactivity and Strategic Innovation, Deliyannis, I., Kostagiolas, P. (Eds), IGI- Global, Accepted.

OTHER PUBLICATIONS, REPORTS AND TECHNICAL REPORTS
[1] Drossos, K., Floros, A., Grigoriou, N., Kavvadia, V., “Final Report for the Implementation of Novel Voice Recognition System”, Ionian University Research Committee, Jan. 3, Corfu, Greece, 2011
[2] Drossos, K., Floros, A., Grigoriou, N., Kavvadia, V., “Report for the Functionality of Voice Recognition System”, Ionian University Research Committee, Nov. 1, Corfu, Greece, 2010