<html> <head> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"> </head> <body>**** We apologise for cross-postings **** **** Please forward this e-mail to potentially interested students/researchers **** About the Research Topic: Human beings are interactive and socially engaged, as they often gather and communicate in either dyads or groups. During such interactions, each communication partner is providing a variety of information, including general information/content, as well as personal and relational information. These communication aspects and information are truly on display in group interactions or multi-party interactions. For many years, analyses of communication was a major objective of several areas within the social sciences, including areas such as investigating inter-personal relationships of the group members and the dynamics of group interaction, cohesion, and performance. Meanwhile, computer scientists started to investigate groups using automatic analyses, often borrowing theoretical foundations from the social sciences. Unfortunately, these two groups, social scientists and computer scientists, have only begun to collaborate. Yet, these collaborations are beginning to be fruitful, but have no home for their work. In particular, the interdisciplinary collaboration between these research communities is currently rather loose because of the limited (i.e. none) possible publication options. Therefore, the main purpose of this Research Topic is to provide an outlet for these collaborative initiatives that are also seeing renewed interest from both communities and their respective funding agencies. This Research Topic provides an opportunity for scholars and researchers to contribute original research articles as well as review articles that will stimulate the continuing effort in group analyses and multi-agent interactions. In addition to methodological and theoretical contributions, we welcome also practical applications. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following: • (multimodal) group analysis (from both communities) • (multimodal) multi-agent analysis (from both communities) • (multimodal) multi-agent interaction (from both communities) • (automatic) multi-agent addressee detection • technical implications of group investigations • social implication of group investigations • human group and agent interaction • teams and computer agent collaboration • analyses of group emotions • explanatory theories for group/agent analysis and interaction • group and teams research using novel technology Important Dates: Abstract: March 8th, 2021 Manuscript: June 21st, 2021 Organisers: Ronald Böck, Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg, Germany Joseph A. Allen, The University of Utah, USA -- Dr.-Ing. Dipl.-Inf. Ronald Böck FEIT IIKT-Cognitive Systems Building 03, Room 322 Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg Universitaetsplatz 2, 39106 Magdeburg, Germany Phone: +49 391 67 50061 E-mail: ronald.boeck@ieee.org ronald.boeck@ovgu.de Web: http://www.kognitivesysteme.de </body> </html>