<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 class=""><div class=""><div class="" style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;"><div class=""><div class="" style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;"><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; min-height: 14px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; text-align: center; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"><b class="">8th Audio/Visual Emotion Challenge and Workshop — AVEC 2018</b></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; text-align: center; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">Co-located with ACM Multimedia 2018 conference, 22-26 October, Seoul, Korea</div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; text-align: center; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"><a href="https://sites.google.com/view/avec2018" class="">https://sites.google.com/view/avec2018</a></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; min-height: 14px;"><br class=""></div><div class="" 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);"><span class="" style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">We are calling for participation in the 8th Audio/Visual Emotion Challenge and Workshop (AVEC 2018), </span><span class="" style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">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 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 class="" style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">introduces major novelties this year with <b class="">three separated sub-challenges:</b></span></div><ul class="" style="list-style-type: square;"><li class="" 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);"><b class=""></b><span class="" style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><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 class="" style="list-style-type: square;"><li class="" 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);"><b class=""></b><span class="" style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><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 class="" style="list-style-type: square;"><li class="" 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);"><b class=""></b><span class="" style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><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 class="" style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);">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 class="" 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;"><br class=""></div><div class="" 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);"><span class="" style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">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 class="" style="list-style-type: square;"><li class="" 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);"><b class=""></b><span class="" style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><b class="">Multimodal Affect Sensing</b></span></li></ul><ul class="" style="list-style-type: square;"><ul class=""><li class="" 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);"><span class="" style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Audio-based Health/Emotion Recognition</span></li><li class="" 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);"><span class="" style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Video-based Health/Emotion Recognition</span></li><li class="" 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);"><span class="" style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Physiological-based Health/Emotion Recognition</span></li><li class="" 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);"><span class="" style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Multimodal Representation Learning</span></li><li class="" 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);"><span class="" style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Semi-supervised and Unsupervised Learning</span></li><li class="" 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);"><span class="" style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Multi-view learning of Multiple Dimensions</span></li><li class="" 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);"><span class="" style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Personalised Health/Emotion Recognition</span></li><li class="" 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);"><span class="" style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Context in Health/Emotion Recognition</span></li><li class="" 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);"><span class="" style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Multiple Rater Ambiguity and Asynchrony</span></li></ul></ul><ul class="" style="list-style-type: square;"><li class="" 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);"><b class=""></b><span class="" style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><b class="">Application</b></span></li><ul class=""><li class="" 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);"><span class="" style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Multimedia Coding and Retrieval</span></li><li class="" 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);"><span class="" style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">Mobile and Online Applications </span></li></ul></ul><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);"><b class="">Important Dates</b></div><ul class="" style="list-style-type: square;"><li class="" style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);">Paper submission: July 8, 2018</li><li class="" style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);">Notification of acceptance: August 5, 2018</li><li class="" style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);">Camera ready paper: August 12, 2018</li><li class="" style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);">Workshop: October 22-26, 2018 (to be communicated)</li></ul><div class="" 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;"><br class=""></div><div class="" 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);"><span class="" style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><b class="">Organisers</b></span></div><div class="" 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;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);">Fabien Ringeval, Université Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, France</div><div class="" 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;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);">Björn Schuller, Imperial College London/University of Augsburg, UK/Germany</div><div class="" 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;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);">Michel Valstar, University of Nottingham, UK</div><div class="" 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;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);">Roddy Cowie, Queen’s University Belfast, UK</div><div class="" 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;"><br class=""></div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);">Maja Pantic, Imperial College London/University of Twente, UK/The Netherlands</div><div class="" style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(33, 33, 33);"><br class=""></div><div class="" 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);"><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/120RIGrlU4gwascoLziKQYltM7iLN3db4/view" class="">View the Call for Participation in PDF</a></div></div></div></div></div></div></body></html>