Gdańsk University of Technology · Faculty of ETI
We study what emotions do to the way software gets built — and how to recognise, model and reuse them.
We are a group of computer scientists whose research focuses on using Affective Computing methods in the field of Software Engineering. Our interests include, but are not limited to, the role of emotions in the software development process, reusing datasets from Affective Computing experiments as well as improving the teaching process of future software engineers.
We are open to any kind of cooperation. Do you want to do research together? Prepare a paper? Submit a project proposal? If you are conducting research at the intersection of the fields of affective computing and software engineering feel free to contact us via email. Take a look at our current research and projects and get in touch!
What we work on
A facial-expression dataset of developers at work, and the crowdsourcing tool built to annotate it.
The DevEmo dataset consists of 217 video clips showing students’ facial expressions as they solve programming tasks. The recordings were collected in the participants’ actual work environment. The video clips are annotated with five labels, including four emotions (anger, confusion, happiness and surprise) and a neutral state.
In order to facilitate the annotation of a large number of video recordings, we have developed AffecTube. It is a comprehensive solution that leverages crowdsourcing to annotate videos directly on the YouTube platform, resulting in ready-to-use emotion-annotated datasets. AffecTube provides a low-resource environment with an intuitive interface and customizable options, making it a versatile tool applicable not only to emotion annotation, but also to various video-based behavioral annotation processes.
Ontologies and mapping methods that let affective datasets from different sources be integrated and reused.
Modern research in Affective Computing often relies on datasets containing experiments-originated data such as biosignals, video clips, or images. Moreover, conducting experiments with a vast number of participants to build datasets for Affective Computing research is time-consuming and expensive. Therefore, it is extremely important to provide solutions allowing one to (re)use data from a variety of sources, which usually demands data integration.
In the research conducted so far, we have proposed a new method for mapping emotions between discrete and dimensional models, the ROAD (Recording Ontology for Affective-related Datasets) ontology and its implementation with the graph knowledge base in the form of the GRISERA framework.
Which emotions are optimal for developers, how to recognise them, and whether they can be influenced.
Emotions play an important role in any human being’s life, including software developers. The aim of our research is to determine what emotions are optimal in the software development process, how to recognize them and how (if at all) to influence them.
Using emotion recognition to make remote programming education more effective.
With the Covid-19 pandemic, the role of distance learning has increased. The aim of the research is to develop methods that, using emotion recognition techniques, will allow for more effective remote learning of programming.
EMBOA — enhancing social robot intervention for children with autism with affective computing.
EMBOA, entitled “Affective loop in Socially Assistive Robotics as an intervention tool for children with autism”, is a research and didactic project that aims at enhancement of social robot intervention in children with autism with affective computing technologies. The project was implemented in the years 2019–2022 under the EU Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership for Higher Education Programme.
Everything we have published
A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Animated Representations of Emotions for Wearable Interfaces
@inproceedings{wrobel2026cross,
author = {Wróbel, MR and Barkana, DE and Landowska, A},
title = {{A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Animated Representations of Emotions for Wearable Interfaces}},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the EmotionSense — 1st International Workshop on Human-centred Emotion-Awareness and Sensing in Pervasive Computing, within The 24th International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom 2026)},
year = {2026},
doi = {10.48550/arXiv.2605.11668},
url = {https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.11668}
}DOI 10.1109/ACCESS.2026.3707903
@article{weichbroth2026exploring,
author = {Weichbroth, P and Łotysz, M and Wróbel, MR},
title = {{Exploring the Relationship Between Emotional State and Perceived Productivity Among Software Developers}},
journal = {IEEE Access},
year = {2026},
doi = {10.1109/ACCESS.2026.3707903},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2026.3707903}
}Guidelines for Emotion Recognition in Robot-Supported Interventions in Autism
DOI 10.1007/s12369-026-01401-2
@article{wrobel2026guidelines,
author = {Wróbel, MR and Bartl-Pokorny, KD and Zorcec, T and Barkana, DE and Kose, H and Milling, M and Robins, B and Schuller, BW and Landowska, A},
title = {{Guidelines for Emotion Recognition in Robot-Supported Interventions in Autism}},
journal = {International Journal of Social Robotics},
year = {2026},
doi = {10.1007/s12369-026-01401-2},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-026-01401-2}
}A Proxy-Based Method for Mapping Discrete Emotions onto VAD model
@inproceedings{wrobel2025proxy,
author = {Wróbel, MR},
title = {{A Proxy-Based Method for Mapping Discrete Emotions onto VAD model}},
booktitle = {The 24th IEEE/WIC International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology (WI-IAT 2025)},
year = {2025},
doi = {10.48550/arXiv.2511.12521},
url = {https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2511.12521}
}Challenges in Observing the Emotions of Children with Autism Interacting with a Social Robot
DOI 10.1007/s12369-024-01185-3
@article{barkana2024challenges,
author = {Barkana, DE and Bartl-Pokorny, KD and Kose, H and Landowska, A and Milling, M and Robins, B and Schuller, BW and Uluer, P and Wróbel, MR and Zorcec, T},
title = {{Challenges in Observing the Emotions of Children with Autism Interacting with a Social Robot}},
journal = {International Journal of Social Robotics},
year = {2024},
doi = {10.1007/s12369-024-01185-3},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-024-01185-3}
}Towards Universal Visualisation of Emotional States for Information Systems
@inproceedings{wrobel2024visualisation,
author = {Wróbel, MR and Landowska, A and Makuch, K},
title = {{Towards Universal Visualisation of Emotional States for Information Systems}},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 32nd International Conference on Information Systems Development (ISD 2024)},
year = {2024},
doi = {10.62036/ISD.2024.117},
url = {https://doi.org/10.62036/ISD.2024.117}
}AffecTube — Chrome extension for YouTube video affective annotations
DOI 10.1016/j.softx.2023.101504
@article{kulas2023affectube,
author = {Kulas, D and Wróbel, MR},
title = {{AffecTube — Chrome extension for YouTube video affective annotations}},
journal = {SoftwareX},
year = {2023},
doi = {10.1016/j.softx.2023.101504},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.softx.2023.101504}
}DevEmo — Software Developers' Facial Expression Dataset
@article{manikowska2023devemo,
author = {Manikowska, M and Sadowski, D and Sowinski, A and Wróbel, MR},
title = {{DevEmo — Software Developers' Facial Expression Dataset}},
journal = {Applied Sciences},
year = {2023},
url = {https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/13/6/3839}
}@article{zawadzka2023electrodermal,
author = {Zawadzka, T and Wierciński, T and Waloszek, W and Wróbel, MR},
title = {{Ontological Modeling for Contextual Data Describing Signals Obtained from Electrodermal Activity for Emotion Recognition and Analysis}},
journal = {IEEE Access},
year = {2023},
url = {https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10070753}
}Graph Representation Integrating Signals for Emotion Recognition and Analysis
@article{zawadzka2021graph,
author = {Zawadzka, T and Wierciński, T and Meller, G and Rock, M and Zwierzycki, R and Wróbel, MR},
title = {{Graph Representation Integrating Signals for Emotion Recognition and Analysis}},
journal = {Sensors},
year = {2021},
url = {https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/21/12/4035}
}Ontological Model for Contextual Data Defining Time Series for Emotion Recognition and Analysis
@article{zawadzka2021ontological,
author = {Zawadzka, T and Waloszek, W and Karpus, A and Zapałowska, S and Wróbel, MR},
title = {{Ontological Model for Contextual Data Defining Time Series for Emotion Recognition and Analysis}},
journal = {IEEE Access},
year = {2021},
url = {https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9635802}
}Robot-based intervention for children with autism spectrum disorder: a systematic literature review
@article{bartlpokorny2021robot,
author = {Bartl-Pokorny, KD and Pykala, M and Uluer, P and Barkana, DE and Baird, A and Kose, H and Zorcec, T and Robins, B and Schuller, BW and Landowska, A},
title = {{Robot-based intervention for children with autism spectrum disorder: a systematic literature review}},
journal = {IEEE Access},
year = {2021},
url = {https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9635826}
}The impact of lexicon adaptation on the emotion mining from software engineering artifacts
@article{wrobel2020lexicon,
author = {Wróbel, MR},
title = {{The impact of lexicon adaptation on the emotion mining from software engineering artifacts}},
journal = {IEEE Access},
year = {2020},
url = {https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9026961}
}Perceptions of Gender Diversity's impact on mood in software development teams
@article{blincoe2019gender,
author = {Blincoe, K and Springer, O and Wróbel, MR},
title = {{Perceptions of Gender Diversity's impact on mood in software development teams}},
journal = {IEEE Software},
year = {2019},
url = {https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8716518}
}Applicability of emotion recognition and induction methods to study the behavior of programmers
@article{wrobel2018applicability,
author = {Wróbel, MR},
title = {{Applicability of emotion recognition and induction methods to study the behavior of programmers}},
journal = {Applied Sciences},
year = {2018},
url = {https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/8/3/323}
}MaliciousIDE — Software Development Environment that Evokes Emotions
@inproceedings{wrobel2018maliciouside,
author = {Wróbel, MR and Zielke, AW},
title = {{MaliciousIDE — Software Development Environment that Evokes Emotions}},
booktitle = {2018 Federated Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems (FedCSIS)},
year = {2018},
url = {https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8511217}
}Scoreboard Architectural Pattern and Integration of Emotion Recognition Results
@article{landowska2018scoreboard,
author = {Landowska, A and Brodny, G},
title = {{Scoreboard Architectural Pattern and Integration of Emotion Recognition Results}},
journal = {IEEE Access},
year = {2018},
url = {https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8587148}
}Towards new mappings between emotion representation models
@article{landowska2018mappings,
author = {Landowska, A},
title = {{Towards new mappings between emotion representation models}},
journal = {Applied Sciences},
year = {2018},
url = {https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/8/2/274}
}Limitations of Emotion Recognition from Facial Expressions in e-Learning Context
@inproceedings{landowska2017limitations,
title = {{Limitations of Emotion Recognition from Facial Expressions in e-Learning Context}},
year = {2017},
url = {https://www.scitepress.org/Papers/2017/63579/63579.pdf}
}Comparison of selected off-the-shelf solutions for emotion recognition based on facial expressions
@inproceedings{brodny2016comparison,
author = {Brodny, G and Kolakowska, A and Landowska, A and Szwoch, M and Szwoch, W and Wróbel, MR},
title = {{Comparison of selected off-the-shelf solutions for emotion recognition based on facial expressions}},
booktitle = {2016 9th International Conference on Human System Interactions (HSI)},
year = {2016},
url = {https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7529664}
}Towards the participant observation of emotions in software development teams
@inproceedings{wrobel2016participant,
author = {Wróbel, MR},
title = {{Towards the participant observation of emotions in software development teams}},
booktitle = {2016 Federated Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems (FedCSIS)},
year = {2016},
url = {https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7733457}
}Modeling emotions for affect-aware applications
@incollection{kolakowska2015modeling,
author = {Kolakowska, A and Landowska, A and Szwoch, M and Szwoch, W and Wróbel, MR},
title = {{Modeling emotions for affect-aware applications}},
booktitle = {Information Systems Development and Applications},
year = {2015},
url = {http://wzr.ug.edu.pl/nauka/upload/files/Information%20systems%20development%20and%20applications.pdf#page=55}
}Emotion recognition and its applications
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-08491-6_5
@incollection{kolakowska2014recognition,
author = {Kolakowska, A and Landowska, A and Szwoch, M and Szwoch, W and Wróbel, MR},
title = {{Emotion recognition and its applications}},
booktitle = {Human-Computer Systems Interaction: Backgrounds and Applications 3},
year = {2014},
doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-08491-6_5},
url = {https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-08491-6_5}
}Emotion recognition and its application in software engineering
@inproceedings{kolakowska2013application,
author = {Kolakowska, A and Landowska, A and Szwoch, M and Szwoch, W and Wróbel, MR},
title = {{Emotion recognition and its application in software engineering}},
booktitle = {6th International Conference on Human System Interactions (HSI)},
year = {2013},
url = {https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/6577877}
}Emotions in the software development process
@inproceedings{wrobel2013emotions,
author = {Wróbel, MR},
title = {{Emotions in the software development process}},
booktitle = {6th International Conference on Human System Interactions (HSI)},
year = {2013},
url = {https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6577875}
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