<html xmlns:v="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml" xmlns:o="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" xmlns:w="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:word" xmlns:m="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/2004/12/omml" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> <meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 14 (filtered medium)"> <style></style> </head> <body lang="EN-US" link="blue" vlink="purple"> <div class="WordSection1"> ** Apologies for cross-posting **<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> ACII (Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction) 2017 - Call for Workshop Papers<o:p></o:p> October 23-26, 2017, San Antonio, Texas<o:p></o:p> <a href="http://acii2017.org/">http://acii2017.org/</a> or follow us @acii2017<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> The seventh International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII) will feature five workshops (<a href="http://acii2017.org/workshops">http://acii2017.org/workshops</a>):<o:p></o:p> <![if !supportLists]>� <![endif]>Context Based Affect Recognition (CBAR)<o:p></o:p> <![if !supportLists]>� <![endif]>Design for Affective Intelligence (DfAI)<o:p></o:p> <![if !supportLists]>� <![endif]>3rd International Workshop on Emotion and Sentiment in Social and Expressive Media (ESSEM 2017): User Engagement and Interaction<o:p></o:p> <![if !supportLists]>� <![endif]>1st Workshop on Tools and Algorithms for Mental Health and Wellbeing, Pain, and Distress (MHWPD)<o:p></o:p> <![if !supportLists]>� <![endif]>2nd International Workshop on Automatic Sentiment Analysis in the Wild<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> Accepted workshop papers will be submitted for inclusion in IEEE Xplore. The paper submission deadline for all workshops is June 15, 2017. Details of each workshop are below.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> <o:p> </o:p> <o:p> </o:p> Context Based Affect Recognition (CBAR)<o:p></o:p> Zakia Hammal, The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University (Contact)<o:p></o:p> Merlin Teodosia Suarez, Center for Empathic Human-Computer Interactions, De La Salle University<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> Unconsciously, humans evaluate situations based on environment and social parameters when recognizing emotions in social interactions. Contextual information, such as the social contexts (e.g., home vs. work), the on-going task (e.g., pain intensity measurement vs. depression severity assessment), the identity (male vs. female), the natural expressiveness of the individual (e.g., introvert vs. extrovert), and the intra- and inter-personal contexts (e.g., pre-existing relationships between healthcare providers and the person in pain), help us better interpret and respond to the environment. These considerations suggest that attention to contextual information can deepen our understanding of affect communication (e.g., discrete emotions vs. affective dimensions such as valence and arousal). Behavioral indicators of affect (e.g., voice tone, face, head, and body movements) need to be merged with contextual information to create objective context-sensitive systems for reliable real-world affect-sensitive applications. The aim of CBAR is to explore new methodologies to represent contextual information for automatic and context-sensitive affect recognition. CBAR aims to gather researchers working in different domains (from low-level detection of vocal cues, face, head, and body movements to highlevel modeling of complex affect recognition) to share their vision on and propose novel approaches for modeling context in affect recognition for real-world social and clinical applications (e.g., pain, autism spectrum disorder).<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> website: <a href="https://cbar2017.blogspot.ca/2017/04/the-5th-international-workshop-on.html"> https://cbar2017.blogspot.ca/2017/04/the-5th-international-workshop-on.html</a><o:p></o:p> submission deadline: June 15, 2017 <o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> <o:p> </o:p> <o:p> </o:p> Design for Affective Intelligence (DfAI)<o:p></o:p> Daria Loi, Giuseppe Raffa, and Asli Arslan Esme (Intel Corporation, USA)<o:p></o:p> Workshop contact: Daria Loi (<a href="mailto:daria.a.loi@intel.com">daria.a.loi@intel.com</a>)<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> Intelligent and Affective systems are set to transform the way we live and experience the world. While many intelligent systems already benefits us through scripted automation and transactions, the need for assistive, unscripted, autonomous systems capable of dealing with growing and aging populations is on the increase. The active role that AI systems are asked to play in people’s life poses many challenges – challenges that increase further when intelligent systems include affective components. The design and development of affective and intelligent systems face massive dilemmas related to the fundamentals of human and social behavior. In addition to many unaddressed (social, behavioral, decisional and moral) questions, many tensions exist among the disciplines that shape how these systems will become part of everyday life.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> The Design for Affective Intelligence (DfAI) workshop focuses on producing, discussing and building on relevant scholarly work to develop a richer understanding of human-centric approaches, tools and guidelines that should ground the design of intelligent and affective systems. Key themes that the workshop will focus on include:<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> <![if !supportLists]>� <![endif]>Usages, verticals and applications that affective and intelligent systems should (and shouldn’t) focus on<o:p></o:p> <![if !supportLists]>� <![endif]>Level of autonomy and agency that affective and intelligent system should (and shouldn’t) have<o:p></o:p> <![if !supportLists]>� <![endif]>Interaction and interface design approaches, best known methods, guidelines, etc. for affective and intelligent systems<o:p></o:p> <![if !supportLists]>� <![endif]>Level of transparency that affective and intelligent systems provide to end users<o:p></o:p> <![if !supportLists]>� <![endif]>Human-centric ways to develop technologically advanced affective & intelligent systems with sustainable business models<o:p></o:p> <![if !supportLists]>� <![endif]>Methods to design affective and intelligent systems that are unobtrusive, effective, accurate, respectful, intuitive and transparent, hence more likely to be embraced (vs rejected) by end users<o:p></o:p> <![if !supportLists]>� <![endif]>Social and behavioral contracts that should underpin human-machine interaction within affective and intelligent systems<o:p></o:p> <![if !supportLists]>� <![endif]>Ethical considerations that should drive the developer community when making technical and design decisions<o:p></o:p> <![if !supportLists]>� <![endif]>Attributes of affective and intelligent system that enable a personal attachment<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> website: <a href="http://dfaiworkshop.wordpress.com"> http://dfaiworkshop.wordpress.com</a><o:p></o:p> submission deadline: June 15, 2017<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> <o:p> </o:p> <o:p> </o:p> 3rd International Workshop on Emotion and Sentiment in Social and Expressive Media (ESSEM 2017): User Engagement and Interaction<o:p></o:p> Cristina Bosco, University of Torino, Italy<o:p></o:p> Erik Cambria, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore<o:p></o:p> Chlo� Clavel, LTCI, Telecom-ParisTech, Paris-Saclay University, Paris, France<o:p></o:p> Rossana Damiano, University of Torino, Italy<o:p></o:p> Viviana Patti, University of Torino, Italy<o:p></o:p> Paolo Rosso, Technical University of Valencia, Spain<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> The role of emotional intelligence is increasing at fast speed in everyday computer-mediated interactions, thanks to the integration of more or less explicit affective elements in social networks, apps, virtual assistants, etc. Expressed through emojis, color, tags or speech, affect has become part of our relationships with computers, adding depth and involvement to them. The technical advancement of the available expressive means, from 3D to language technologies, is one of the key factors of this process.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> ESSEM 2017 addresses the expression of emotions in many-to-many interaction and in one-to-one interaction as a tool for promoting, analysing and measuring user engagement. In particular, we are interested in tools and models that rely on NLP, acoustic and video analysis; theories and methods that bridge the expression of emotions from language to media are especially needed to overcome the limitations of language-specific and media-specific approaches.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> ACII represents a unique possibility, for the ESSEM community, to focus on interaction as a testbed for the models and tools developed for social and expressive media. The ultimate goal is to devise socio-emotional strategies to foster user engagement. We encourage contributions on applications that specifically address the role of sentiment and emotions in the interactions that occur through social and expressive media, with a special focus on cultural heritage, artistic expression, education and entertainment (e.g., storytelling, artistic curation, audience development, games and edutainment). ESSEM aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners both from academia and industry. It wants to take an active part in growing a new field in terms of multidisciplinary research and to investigate open issues by cross-validating different approaches in emotion research.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> website: <a href="http://di.unito.it/essem17"> http://di.unito.it/essem17</a><o:p></o:p> submission deadline: June 15, 2017<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> <o:p> </o:p> <o:p> </o:p> 1st Workshop on Tools and Algorithms for Mental Health and Wellbeing, Pain, and Distress (MHWPD)<o:p></o:p> Steffen Walter (University of Ulm, Germany)<o:p></o:p> Nadia Bianchi-Berthouze (UCLIC - UCL Interaction Centre, UK)<o:p></o:p> Akane Sano (MIT)<o:p></o:p> Ognjen (Oggi) Rudovic (MIT)<o:p></o:p> Bj�rn Schuller (Imperial College London/University of Passau)<o:p></o:p> Rosalind W. Picard (MIT)<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> This workshop is in the field of affective health computing, focusing on detection and intervention techniques for mental health and well-being, pain and distress. We invite contributions from researchers with multidisciplinary expertise (computer science, engineering, psychology and medicine), both in academia and industry, in the following domains:<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> Distress - e.g. pain, panic, confusion, itching - in patients with restricted communicative verbal abilities such as neonates and children, somnolent patients and patients with dementia is difficult to diagnose. For example, the subjectively experienced pain may be partly or even completely unrelated to the somatic pathology of tissue damage and other disorders. Therefore, the clinically used methods of distress assessment do not allow for objective and robust measurement, and physicians must rely on the patient’s report regarding the quality and intensity of the distress. Common tools are verbal scales, which are restricted to patients with normal mental abilities. However, there are procedures for distress assessment available for people with verbal and/or cognitive impairments and scales for pain assessment in people who are sedated and require ventilation. Overall, these diagnostic methods have limited reliability, validity or are very time consuming. If valid measurement of distress is not possible, treating the negative affect may lead to cardiac stress in risk patients and over- or under-usage of medical treatment. There are several efforts to create an automatic system for recognizing distress through different kind of modalities and machine learning techniques.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> Mental health and wellbeing, which are one of the most challenging issues of the modern society. For instance, depression is growing worldwide: by 2020 one suicide will happen every 20 seconds, and by 2030 it will be the #1 disease burden. Other typical causes of poor mental health and wellbeing are high levels of stress and anxiety, sleep deprivation, and loneliness due to impoverished social communication. Also, chronic mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, and neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism, if not monitored and treated timely, can lead to further degradation of the person’s mental health and wellbeing. Most existing methods and algorithms for monitoring and providing feedback to individual’s mental health and wellbeing have been built/evaluate using (limited) data captured in highly constrained settings (e.g., labs). This can limit the applicability and reliability of such tools and algorithms when applied in every-day situations. The goals of this part of the workshop are (i) to explore practical research challenges and opportunities for designing new methods, algorithms and applications for affect/mood measurement/prediction in every-day life or clinical settings, and (ii) to introduce novel target tools and algorithms and discuss the directions on how the design of these should be tackled in the future.<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> website: <a href="http://mhw.media.mit.edu"> http://mhw.media.mit.edu</a><o:p></o:p> submission deadline: June 15, 2017<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> <o:p> </o:p> <o:p> </o:p> 2nd International Workshop on Automatic Sentiment Analysis in the Wild<o:p></o:p> Maja Pantic (Imperial College London, UK)<o:p></o:p> Bjoern Schuller (University of Passau, DE)<o:p></o:p> Ioannis Panagakis (Univesity of Middlesex, UK)<o:p></o:p> Hesam Sagha (audEERING, DE)<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> The WASA workshop series is the premier international forum for research on technologies for analysis of human sentiment, empathic and social behaviour observed in the wild. The program will consist of three Keynotes, an oral session, and a demonstration session. Submissions will be rigorously reviewed, and should clearly make the case for a documented improvement over the existing state of the art. The workshop will be held in conjunction with the International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction 2017.<o:p></o:p> The general workshop topics will include, but are not limited to:<o:p></o:p> <![if !supportLists]>� <![endif]>Social Intelligence and Sentiment Modeling<o:p></o:p> <![if !supportLists]>� <![endif]>Sentiment, empathy & social behavior analysis from vocal, facial & bodily expressions recorded in the wild<o:p></o:p> <![if !supportLists]>� <![endif]>Expressive speech analysis in social interactions observed in the wild<o:p></o:p> <![if !supportLists]>� <![endif]>Human gesture and action recognition in social interactions observed in the wild<o:p></o:p> <![if !supportLists]>� <![endif]>Perceptual, empathic, and socially-aware user interfaces<o:p></o:p> <![if !supportLists]>� <![endif]>Empathic multimedia recommendation systems<o:p></o:p> <![if !supportLists]>� <![endif]>Databases for training and testing<o:p></o:p> <![if !supportLists]>� <![endif]>Empathic and socially-aware computing and applications<o:p></o:p> <o:p> </o:p> website: <a href="http://audeering.com/acii-wasa"> http://audeering.com/acii-wasa</a><o:p></o:p> submission deadline: June 15, 2017<o:p></o:p> </div> </body> </html>