Supporting Affective Interactions for Real-time Applications (SAFIRA) is a project funded by the European Commission under the Information Society Technologies Programme (IST).

IST is a single, integrated research programme that builds on the convergence of information processing, communications and media technologies.

The project objective is to bring to the software community an enabling technology to support affective interactions, in particular:

• To create a framework to enrich interactions and applications with an affective dimension;

• To implement a toolkit for affective computing combining a set of components addressing affective knowledge acquisition, representation, reasoning, planning, communication and expression;

• To verify under which conditions the hypothesis that emotion, as well as other affective phenomena, contributes to improve rationality and general intelligent behaviour of the synthetic characters, thus leading to more believable interactions between humans and computers.