Laurence Devillers

About

Laurence Devillers is a prominent researcher whose work sits at the intersection of affective computing, speech processing, and human-robot interaction. Best known for her pioneering contributions to automatic emotion recognition from speech, she has helped shape how machines perceive and respond to human emotional states. Her foundational work on acoustic and linguistic feature extraction for emotional user state classification — most notably through large-scale collaborative studies involving children interacting with social robots — established critical benchmarks in the field, earning nearly 200 citations for her 2007 study alone. Devillers has been instrumental in addressing the real-world robustness challenges of emotion recognition, advocating for compact, reliable acoustic feature sets deployable across diverse contexts. Beyond the technical, she has emerged as a leading voice on the ethical dimensions of affective computing and social robotics, contributing to France's national ethics commission (CERNA) and publishing influential work on the moral implications of companion robots in healthcare settings. Her multimodal data collection efforts, including the Joker project studying human-robot humor, reflect a commitment to richer, more naturalistic interaction research. Collectively, her work bridges rigorous engineering with urgent humanistic questions about how society should responsibly develop emotionally intelligent machines.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   The relevance of feature type for the automatic classification of emotional user states: low level descriptors and functionals

   189 citations · 2007
2. 2
   Whodunnit – Searching for the most important feature types signalling emotion-related user states in speech

   146 citations · 2010
3. 3
   Towards a Small Set of Robust Acoustic Features for Emotion Recognition: Challenges

   96 citations · 2015
4. 4
   Natural Interaction with Robots, Knowbots and Smartphones

   45 citations · 2013
5. 5
   Patterns, prototypes, performance: classifying emotional user states

   41 citations · 2008
6. 6
   Multimodal data collection of human-robot humorous interactions in the Joker project

   36 citations · 2015
7. 7
   Inference of Human Beings’ Emotional States from Speech in Human–Robot Interactions

   33 citations · 2015
8. 8
   Ethics in Robotics Research: CERNA Mission and Context

   31 citations · 2017
9. 9
   Human–Robot Interactions and Affective Computing: The Ethical Implications

   31 citations · 2021
10. 10
    Towards Metrics of Evaluation of Pepper Robot as a Social Companion for the Elderly

    30 citations · 2018

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links