Call for papers: Workshop on Collective States in Multimodal Interaction, at ICMI 2026

[giovanna varni]

***Apologies for cross-posting***

Dear colleagues, 

We invite you to our workshop:

Collective States in Multimodal Interaction
9 October 2026
at ICMI 2026, Napoli, Italy

https://honda-research-institute.github.io/Collective_States_in_Multimodal_Interaction/

Call for Papers

We invite you to submit your unpublished work to the Workshop on Collective States in Multimodal Interaction, to be held in conjunction with the 28th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2026) in Napoli, Italy. The workshop will take place on one of the conference workshop days, 9 October 2026. Accepted papers will be presented at the workshop. See the workshop website for updates and submission details.

Understanding collective states in group interaction is an emerging challenge at the intersection of multimodal AI, communication science, and social signal processing. While a large body of prior work has focused on individuals or dyads, many real-world settings, from meetings and brainstorming sessions to collaborative human-AI teams, depend on group-level phenomena such as collective engagement, shared attention, group affects, rapport, cohesion, and coordination. Recent progress in multimodal sensing and agentic AI creates new opportunities to model how these collective states arise, evolve, and influence individual behavior within groups.

This workshop focuses on multi-party interaction settings in which AI systems must not only sense individuals, but also understand emergent group dynamics and, potentially, support them as peers or facilitators. The goal is to bring together researchers across artificial intelligence, multimodal interaction, and organization and communication science to advance methods, benchmarks, and applications for sensing and reasoning about collective states.

The workshop will feature invited talks by Prof. Carlos Busso (Carnegie Mellon University) and Prof. Kazuhiro Otsuka (Yokohama National University). 

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Multimodal sensing and modeling of collective states in group interaction
• Group-level phenomena such as collective engagement, shared attention, group affect, rapport, cohesion, and coordination
• Links between individual participant states and emergent group dynamics
• Audio, video, language, physiological, and behavioral cues for multiparty interaction analysis
• Multimodal fusion and temporal modeling for group behavior understanding
• Annotation schemes, datasets, and benchmarks for collective states
• AI agents as peers or facilitators in human-AI hybrid teams
• Adaptive systems for improving participation, coordination, brainstorming, and collaboration
• Explainability, robustness, fairness, privacy, and ethics in group sensing
• Applications in meetings, education, healthcare, robotics, organizational settings, and other collaborative environments

Submission Information

We invite authors to submit papers in accordance with the ICMI formats via the PCS. Submissions will be peer-reviewed by the workshop committee. The review process will be double-blind. 

Important Dates

Paper submission deadline: 17 July 2026
Notification to authors: 27 July 2026
Camera-ready deadline: 2 August 2026
Workshop day: 9 October 2026

Best,

Giovanna Varni

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Associate Professor, University of Trento

DISI - Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science

Via Sommarive 9, 38123 Povo (TN), Italy