Kuo-En Hung

Hung-Yue Suen, Kuo-En Hung, Fan-Hsun Tseng

This paper outlines a machine learning-enabled speaker-centric Emotion AI approach capable of predicting audience-affective engagement and vocal attractiveness in asynchronous video-based learning, relying solely on speaker-side affective expressions. Inspired by the demand for scalable, privacy-preserving affective computing applications, this speaker-centric Emotion AI approach incorporates two distinct regression models that leverage a massive corpus developed within Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to enable affectively engaging experiences. The regression model predicting affective engagement is developed by assimilating emotional expressions emanating from facial dynamics, oculomotor features, prosody, and cognitive semantics, while incorporating a second regression model to predict vocal attractiveness based exclusively on speaker-side acoustic features. Notably, on speaker-independent test sets, both regression models yielded impressive predictive performance (R2 = 0.85 for affective engagement and R2 = 0.88 for vocal attractiveness), confirming that speaker-side affect can functionally represent aggregated audience feedback. This paper provides a speaker-centric Emotion AI approach substantiated by an empirical study discovering that speaker-side multimodal features, including acoustics, can prospectively forecast audience feedback without necessarily employing audience-side input information.

Hung-Yue Suen, Kuo-En Hung

This paper presents an interpretable closed-loop Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) that supports feedback-guided practice for developing on-camera oral presentation skills at scale. The system operationalizes a seven-dimensional Behaviorally Anchored Rating Scale (BARS) and implements a three-layer interpretable feedback architecture that connects rubric-aligned multimodal scoring, audience-perceived expressive diagnostics, and retrieval-augmented conversational coaching to support deliberate practice. Built on an XGBoost backbone, the ITS maps multimodal inputs (facial, vocal, textual, and oculomotor features) into evidence-based feedback that can be traced back to observable performance cues. Trained on 10,360 Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) video segments, the system achieved rubric-aligned scoring with performance levels comparable to expert ratings (R2 = 0.48-0.61, Spearman's rho = 0.69-0.78, MAE = 0.43-0.57). In a pre-post validation study with 204 adult learners over a 30-day practice window, participants demonstrated significant improvements across all seven BARS dimensions (Cohen's d = 0.39-0.90), with practice frequency showing a strong positive association with posttest performance after controlling for baseline scores and demographics. The results demonstrate how multimodal analytic outputs can be systematically transformed into observable behavioral change through an integrated feedback architecture, advancing explainable and pedagogically grounded ITS design for performance-based competencies.

Hung-Yue Suen, Kuo-En Hung, Che-Wei Liu et al.

Whether an interviewee's honest and deceptive responses can be detected by facial expression signals in videos has been debated and requires further research. We developed deep learning models enabled by computer vision to extract temporal patterns of job applicants' facial expressions and head movements to identify self-reported honest and deceptive impression management (IM) tactics from video frames in real asynchronous video interviews. A 12- to 15-minute video was recorded for each of N=121 job applicants as they answered five structured behavioral interview questions. Each applicant completed a survey to self-evaluate their trustworthiness on four IM measures. Additionally, a field experiment was conducted to compare the concurrent validity associated with self-reported IMs between our modeling approach and human interviewers. Human interviewers' performance in predicting these IM measures from another subset of 30 videos was obtained by having N=30 human interviewers evaluate three recordings. Our models explained 91% and 84% of the variance in honest and deceptive IMs, respectively, and showed stronger correlations with self-reported IM scores than human interviewers.