<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class="">*** apologies for cross-posting ***<br class=""><div><div class=""><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div class=""><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; min-height: 14px;" class=""><br class=""></div><div style="margin: 0px; text-align: center; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;" class=""><b class="">8th Audio/Visual Emotion Challenge and Workshop — AVEC 2018</b></div><div style="margin: 0px; text-align: center; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;" class="">Co-located with ACM Multimedia 2018 conference, 22-26 October, Seoul, Korea</div><div style="margin: 0px; text-align: center; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;" class=""><a href="https://sites.google.com/view/avec2018" class="">https://sites.google.com/view/avec2018</a></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; min-height: 14px;" class=""><br class=""></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; color: rgb(33, 33, 33); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" class="">We are calling for participation in the 8th Audio/Visual Emotion Challenge and Workshop (AVEC 2018), </span><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">an ACM MM Challenge Workshop themed around two topics: for the first time in a challenge <b class="">bipolar disorder</b> and <b class="">emotion recognition</b>. Bipolar disorder (BD) is a serious mental health disorder, with patients experiencing either manic or depressive episodes. Those with BD tend to live with this long-term. The purpose of the Audio/Visual Emotion Challenge and Workshop (AVEC) series is to bring together multiple communities from different disciplines, in particular the audio-visual multimedia communities and those in the psychological and social sciences who study expressive behaviour and emotion. </span><span style="" class="">The AVEC 2018 challenge theme is on Bipolar disorder and Cross-cultural emotion, and it is the eighth competition event aimed at comparison of multimedia processing and machine learning methods for automatic audio, visual, and audiovisual health and emotion analysis, with all participants competing under strictly the same conditions. It </span><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">introduces major novelties this year with <b class="">three separated sub-challenges:</b></span></div> <ul style="list-style-type: square" class=""> <li style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; color: rgb(33, 33, 33); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""><b class=""></b><span style="font-kerning: none" class=""><b class="">Bipolar Disorder Sub-challenge</b> (BDS) — participants have to classify patients suffering from bipolar disorder into remission, hypo-mania and mania, as defined by the young mania rating scale, from audio-visual recordings of structured interviews (BD corpus); performance is measured by the unweighted average recall over the three classes.</span></li></ul> <ul style="list-style-type: square" class=""> <li style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; color: rgb(33, 33, 33); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""><b class=""></b><span style="font-kerning: none" class=""><b class="">Cross-cultural Emotion Sub-challenge</b> (CES) — participants have to predict the level of three emotional dimensions (arousal, valence, and likability) time-continuously in a cross-cultural setup (German => Hungarian) from audio-visual recordings of dyadic interactions (SEWA corpus); performance is the concordance correlation coefficient (CCC) averaged over the dimensions.</span></li></ul> <ul style="list-style-type: square" class=""> <li style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; color: rgb(33, 33, 33); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""><b class=""></b><span style="font-kerning: none" class=""><b class="">Gold-standard Emotion Sub-Challenge</b> (GES) — participants have to generate a gold-standard (i.e., a single time series of emotion labels) from individual ratings of emotional dimensions (arousal, valence) that will be evaluated by a multimodal (audio, video, physiology) emotion recognition system from recordings of dyadic interactions (RECOLA corpus); performance is the concordance correlation coefficient (CCC) averaged over the dimensions.</span></li></ul><div style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class="">In order to participate in the Challenge, please register your team by following the <a href="https://sites.google.com/view/avec2018/home/challenge-guidelines" class="">challenge guidelines</a>.</div><div style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33); min-height: 14px;" class=""><br class=""></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; color: rgb(33, 33, 33); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">We encourage both - contributions aiming at highest performance w.r.t. the baselines provided by the organisers, and contributions aiming at finding new and interesting insights w.r.t. these challenges. Besides participation in the challenge, we are also encouraging submissions of original contributions on the following topics (not limited to):</span></div> <ul style="list-style-type: square" class=""> <li style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; color: rgb(33, 33, 33); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""><b class=""></b><span style="font-kerning: none" class=""><b class="">Multimodal Affect Sensing</b></span></li> </ul> <ul style="list-style-type: square" class=""> <ul class=""> <li style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; color: rgb(33, 33, 33); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">Audio-based Health/Emotion Recognition</span></li> <li style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; color: rgb(33, 33, 33); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">Video-based Health/Emotion Recognition</span></li> <li style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; color: rgb(33, 33, 33); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">Physiological-based Health/Emotion Recognition</span></li> <li style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; color: rgb(33, 33, 33); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">Multimodal Representation Learning</span></li> <li style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; color: rgb(33, 33, 33); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">Semi-supervised and Unsupervised Learning</span></li> <li style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; color: rgb(33, 33, 33); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">Multi-view learning of Multiple Dimensions</span></li> <li style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; color: rgb(33, 33, 33); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">Personalised Health/Emotion Recognition</span></li> <li style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; color: rgb(33, 33, 33); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">Context in Health/Emotion Recognition</span></li> <li style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; color: rgb(33, 33, 33); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">Multiple Rater Ambiguity and Asynchrony</span></li></ul></ul> <ul style="list-style-type: square" class=""> <li style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; color: rgb(33, 33, 33); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""><b class=""></b><span style="font-kerning: none" class=""><b class="">Application</b></span></li> <ul class=""> <li style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; color: rgb(33, 33, 33); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">Multimedia Coding and Retrieval</span></li> <li style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; color: rgb(33, 33, 33); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class="">Mobile and Online Applications </span></li></ul></ul><div style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""><b class="">Important Dates</b></div> <ul style="list-style-type: square" class=""> <li style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class="">Paper submission: June 30, 2018</li> <li style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class="">Notification of acceptance: July 31, 2018</li> <li style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class="">Camera ready paper: August 14, 2018</li> <li style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class="">Workshop: October 22-26, 2018 (to be communicated)</li> </ul><div style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33); min-height: 14px;" class=""><br class=""></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; color: rgb(33, 33, 33); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""><span style="font-kerning: none" class=""><b class="">Organisers</b></span></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33); min-height: 14px;" class=""><br class=""></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class="">Fabien Ringeval, Université Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, France</div><div style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 5px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33); min-height: 6px;" class=""><br class=""></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class="">Björn Schuller, Imperial College London/University of Augsburg, UK/Germany</div><div style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 5px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33); min-height: 6px;" class=""><br class=""></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class="">Michel Valstar, University of Nottingham, UK</div><div style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 5px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33); min-height: 6px;" class=""><br class=""></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class="">Roddy Cowie, Queen’s University Belfast, UK</div><div style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 5px; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33); min-height: 6px;" class=""><br class=""></div><div style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class="">Maja Pantic, Imperial College London/University of Twente, UK/The Netherlands</div><div style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""><br class=""></div><div style="text-align: center; margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);" class=""><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/120RIGrlU4gwascoLziKQYltM7iLN3db4/view" class="">View the Call for Participation in PDF</a></div></div></div><br class=""></div></div></div><br class=""></body></html>