Prasanth Murali

I am a Ph.D. candidate at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, where I work at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Human Computer Interaction. I am advised by Prof. Timothy Bickmore and my research goal is to leverage recent advancements in AI and immersive technologies such as AR/VR, to create meaningful oral presentation experiences.

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The ability to monitor audience reactions is critical when delivering presentations. However, current videoconferencing platforms offer limited solutions to support this. This work leverages recent advances in affect sensing to capture and facilitate communication of relevant audience signals. Using an exploratory survey (N=175), we assessed the most relevant audience responses such as confusion, engagement, and head-nods. We then implemented AffectiveSpotlight, a Microsoft Teams bot that analyzes facial responses and head gestures of audience members and dynamically spotlights the most expressive ones. In a within-subjects study with 14 groups (N=117),we observed that the system made presenters significantly more aware of their audience, speak for a longer period of time, and self-assess the quality of their talk more similarly to the audience members, compared to two control conditions (randomly-selected spotlight and default platform UI). We provide design recommendations for future affective interfaces for online presentations based on feedback from the study.

Persuasion is a primary goal of public speaking, and eliciting audience empathy increases persuasion. In this research, we explore sharing a speaker’s heart rate as a social cue, to elicit empathy and increase persuasion in the audience. In particular, we developed two interfaces embedding the speaker’s heart rate over a recorded presentation video - as an animated line graph (raw representation) and as a color coded channel (abstract representation). In a randomized, counter-balanced, within subjects study (n = 18), we evaluated the concept using the two interfaces along with a baseline no heart rate condition. We observed that heart rate sharing significantly increased persuasion for participants with normal baseline empathy levels and increased empathic accuracy for all participants. Our qualitative analysis showed that heart rate was a useful cue in highlighting the emotions of the speaker, making the participants empathize with the speaker and pay more attention to the talk during those times. Our findings lead to a discussion of using heart rate as a social signal in a persuasive context, with implications for future research.

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