Bin Han, a PhD candidate in Computer Science at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and a researcher at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), was recognized as a co-author of the Best Paper Award at the 2025 Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII) conference. The paper, “Steal and Smile: Impact of Emotion Regulation and Social Values on Smiles in Social Conflicts,” led by Mirella Hladký with co-authors Jonathan Gratch, Patrick Gebhard, Tanja Schneeberger, and Han, examines the psychological and computational dimensions of smiling in competitive social situations. The research arose from an interdisciplinary collaboration between Bin Han and Mirella Hladky, a PhD student from the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI).
The research investigates why people sometimes smile in tense or adversarial contexts. Drawing on behavioral data from 132 participants in controlled social dilemma experiments, the authors analyzed over 400 smile episodes to explore how emotion regulation and social value orientation influence facial expressions during interpersonal conflict.
By combining psychological theory with explainable artificial intelligence and machine learning, the study reveals that outwardly similar smiles can serve divergent purposes, including: expressing empathy, concealing discomfort, or signaling dominance, and more, depending on emotional state and situational context.
Han’s research interests span Human-Computer Interaction, Affective Computing, and Virtual Reality, with a focus on integrating emotional intelligence into interactive systems. She recently completed a research internship at Apple, contributing to projects at the intersection of emotion, design, and technology.
The recognition at ACII 2025 underscores USC’s strength in affective computing and ICT’s ongoing contribution to the study of emotion, behavior, and artificial intelligence.