Modeling Visual Aesthetics, Emotion, and Artistic Style

James Z. Wang is a Distinguished Professor of the College of Information Sciences and Technology at The Pennsylvania State University. He received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics summa cum laude from the University of Minnesota (1994), and an M.S. degree in mathematics (1997), an M.S. degree in computer science (1997), and a Ph.D. in medical information sciences (2000), all from Stanford University. His research interests include affective computing, image analysis, image modeling, image retrieval, and their applications. He was a visiting professor at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University (2007-2008), a lead special section guest editor of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (2008), and a program manager at the Office of the Director of the National Science Foundation (2011-2012).

Reginald B. Adams, Jr. is a Professor of Psychology at The Pennsylvania State University. He received his Ph.D. in social psychology from Dartmouth College in 2002. Reg is interested in how we extract social and emotional meaning from nonverbal cues, particularly via the face. His work addresses how multiple social messages (e.g., emotion, gender, race, age, etc.) combine across multiple modalities and interact to form the unified representations that guide our impressions of and responses to others. Although his questions are social psychological in origin, his research draws upon vision cognition and affective neuroscience to address social perception at the functional and neuroanatomical levels. With his colleagues, Reg helped establish and champion the subfield of Social Vision by publishing an edited volume titled The Science of Social Vision (Adams, Ambady, Nakayama, & Shimojo, 2010, Oxford University Press).