Harry Griffin

Detection of emotion and wellbeing from the human face and body, both by other humans and through wearable and remote technology. I'm currently working on the EIT-Digital High Impact Initiative: Professionals Fit to Perform, which will create innovative technical solutions for monitoring and improving the health and performance of drivers.

I'm working on an EIT-ICT High Impact Initiative: Fit to Perform, which aims to create innovative technical solutions for monitoring and improving the health and performance of drivers. This builds on my interest in the use of remote and wearable technology to monitor our emotions and wellbeing. This technology allows us to develop novel solutions for helping us to live healthier lives, which can be of particular value to people with chronic and degenerative diseases. It also serves to enhance our understanding of how we perceive and interact with each other. My previous work also included how we perceive faces and bodies in order to identify emotions, individuals and the relationships between people. These perceptions are not ends in themselves but serve to drive our actions, so I'm also interested in how different aspects of interpersonal perception affect our interactions.

Brief biography

Currently (October 2021) Evaluation Manager, Research and Monitoring Unit, Sustrans.

I received my undergraduate degree in Natural Sciences (Experimental Psychology) from the University of Cambridge in 2001. I then worked as a research assistant at the MRC-Cognition and Brain Sciences unit for Prof. Tony Marcel and in the Department of Experimental Psychology in Cambridge for Prof. Gregg DiGirolamo, investigating tactile and visual perception. My PhD (completed in 2006, also with Gregg) was on the visual perception of faces, with a specific focus on eye-movements and how brain injury leading to prosopagnosia might affect our ability to strategically target our eye-movements to information rich areas within a face. My first postdoctoral position was at the Institute of Neurology with Prof. Marjan Jahanshahi, during which I investigated how visual cues may help people with Parkinson's Disease improve motor function in walking and overcome freezing of gait. This work is closely linked to the fascinating phenomenon of paradoxical kinesis, here are some remarkable examples on a bike and with a football. I then moved to the Vision Research Lab at UCL to work with Prof. Alan Johnston on perception of dynamic faces. During this project we exhibited our work at the excellent Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition with our collaborators from Queen Mary, University of London. I then moved to UCLIC to work with Nadia Bianchi-Berthouze on ILHAIRE, an EU FP7 project which combined Psychology and Human-Computer Interaction techniques to integrate laughter into human-avatar interactions. The novel technologies and approaches developed by the ILHAIRE consortium were evaluated yearly at the eNTERFACE Workshop on Multimodal Interfaces and generated great interest at ICT 2013 conference in Vilnius,