CFP: 3rd International Workshop on Affective Interaction in Natural Environments at ACM Multimedia 2010

[Kostas Karpouzis]

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AFFINE 2010: 3rd International Workshop on
Affective Interaction in Natural Environments
at ACM Multimedia 2010
Friday 29th October 2010, Firenze, Italy
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/conference/affine2010
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Background
-------------

A vital requirement for social robots, virtual agents, and
human-centered multimedia interfaces is the ability to infer the
affective and mental states of humans and provide appropriate, timely
output during sustained social interactions. Examples include ensuring
that the user is interested in maintaining the interaction or providing
suitable empathic responses through the display of facial expressions,
gestures, or generation of speech.

This workshop will cover real-time computational techniques for the
recognition and interpretation of human multimodal verbal and non-verbal
behaviour, models of mentalising and empathising for interaction, and
multimedia techniques for synthesis of believable social behaviour
supporting human-agent and human-robot interaction.

A key aim of the workshop is the identification and investigation of
important open issues in real-time, affect-aware applications 'in the
wild' and especially in embodied interaction, i.e. with robots and
embodied conversational agents. Issues such as natural and multimodal
interaction, estimation and adaption to context, context dependent
processing and related databases, HCI/HRI beyond emotion (cognition,
behaviour, etc.), and best practices for applications in real
environments will be discussed in the context of interacting with other
humans and social artefacts.

We welcome the participation of researchers from diverse fields,
including signal processing and pattern recognition, machine learning,
cognition, affective science, human-computer interaction, human-robot
interaction, and robotics. We hope an interdisciplinary group will
benefit from mutual osmosis of ideas, concepts and developments in the
field.

The workshop especially welcomes studies that provide new insights into
the use of multimodal and multimedia techniques for enabling interaction
between humans, robots, and virtual agents in naturalistic settings. We
also encourage the submission of work-in-progress papers including
recent results providing novel and exciting contributions.

Accepted papers will be published in the ACM Digital Library. A journal
special issue is currently being planned. (Details forthcoming).

Topics
--------

Workshop topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Multimedia expression generation in robots and virtual agents,
including:
* Gaze
* Gestures
* Facial Expressions
* Speech
* Other modalities
- Multimodal human affect and social behaviour recognition, including:
* Facial expressions
* Body language
* Speech
* Physiological
* Other modalities
- Perception-action loops in agents/robots
- Cognitive and affective 'mentalising'
- Visual attention / user engagement with robots and embodied
conversational agents (ECAs)
- Emotion and cognitive state representation
- Social context awareness and adaptation
- Natural Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) / Human-Computer
Interaction (HCI)
- Multimedia HCI
- Multimodal and emotional corpora (naturally evoked or induced
emotion)
- Recognition of human behaviour for implicit tagging
- Contributions to standards for multimodal interaction and
specification of mark-up languages
- Applications to interactive games, robots and virtual agents


About AFFINE
-----------------
This workshop follows the previous successful AFFINE workshops organised
as satellite events of ICMI '08
(http://www.telecom.tuc.gr/~potam/icmi2008/) and ICMI-MLMI '09
(http://icmi2009.acm.org/), as well as a special session organised at
WIAMIS '09 (http://wiamis2009.qmul.net/). This is the first time the
workshop has been held at ACM Multimedia. AFFINE has a track record for
attracting researchers from the virtual agents, social robotics and
affective computing communities and encourages interdisciplinarity -
submissions from other domains are also very welcome.


Important Dates
-------------------
- Deadline for paper submission: 10 June 2010
- Notification of acceptance: 10 July 2010
- Camera ready paper: 20 July 2010


Submission Instructions
---------------------------------
Please prepare your paper in accordance with the ACM Multimedia
Guidelines. Your paper may be either 4 or 6 pages in length, including
references and figures.

Authors may submit a pdf version of their paper using the ACM Multimedia
2010 paper submission system. Please note: The review process is
double-blind, so please be sure to remove any identifying information
before uploading your submission (name, affiliation, tell-tale
references, etc).

Contact
-----------
If you have any questions, please write to the organisers: affine2010 at
googlemail dot com

Organising Committee
------------------------------------
General Chairs:
* Ginevra Castellano, Queen Mary University London, UK
* Kostas Karpouzis, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
* Laurel Riek, University of Cambridge, UK

Program Chairs:
* Jean-Claude Martin, LIMSI-CNRS, France
* Louis-Philippe Morency, University of Southern California, USA
* Christopher Peters, Coventry University, UK

Program Committee (alphabetical)
------------------------------------------------
* Aris Alissandrakis (ATR, Japan)
* Elisabeth Andre (Augsburg Universtiy, Germany)
* Tony Belpaeme (University of Plymouth, UK)
* Elisabetta Bevacqua (CNRS/TELECOM ParisTech, France)
* Timothy Bickmore (Northeastern University, USA)
* Nadia Bianchi-Berthouze (University College London, UK)
* Carlos Busso (The University of Texas at Dallas, USA)
* Lola Canamero (Univ. of Hertfordshire, UK)
* Marc Cavazza (University of Teesside, UK)
* Kerstin Dautenhahn (University of Hertfordshire, UK)
* Vanessa Evers (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)
* Hatice Gunes (Imperial College, UK)
* Dirk Heylen (University of Twente, Netherlands)
* Stefanos Kollias (National Technical University of Athens, Greece)
* Maurizio Mancini (University of Genova, Italy)
* Carlos Martinho (Instituto Superior Tecnico, Portugal)
* Peter William McOwan (Queen Mary University of London, UK)
* Yukiko Nakano (Seikei University, Japan)
* Anton Nijholt (University of Twente, Netherlands)
* Maja Pantic (Imperial College London, UK / Univ. of Twente, NL)
* Catherine Pelachaud (CNRS/TELECOM ParisTech, France)
* Peter Robinson (University of Cambridge, UK)
* Candace Sidner (Worcester Polytechnic Institute, USA)
* Marc Schroeder (DFKI, Germany)
* Bjoern Schuller (Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Germany)
* Gualtiero Volpe (University of Genova, Italy)
* Astrid Weiss (University of Salzburg, Austria)
* Yorick Wilks (University of Oxford, UK)
* Georgios Yannakakis (IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
* Massimo Zancanaro (FBK, Italy)

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