CfP - 9th AudioVisual Emotion Challenge (AVEC 2019): State-of-Mind, Depression with AI, and Cross-cultural Affect

[fabien....@gmail.com]

The Audio/Visual Emotion Challenge and Workshop (AVEC 2019) will be held as a workshop of ACM Multimedia 2019 in Nice, France.

AVEC 2019 will be the ninth 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.

The challenge theme is on State-of-Mind, Depression with AI, and Cross-cultural emotion.

For more information, see https://sites.google.com/view/avec2019/.


*Call for participation*

We are calling for teams to participate in three Sub-Challenges:

State-of-Mind Sub-Challenge (SoMS)
The AVEC 2019 SoMS is a new task focusing on the continuous adaptation of human state-of-mind (SOM), which is pivotal for mental functioning and behaviour regulation. In the SoMS, self-reported mood (10-point Likert scale), before and after the narrative of personal stories (two positive and two negative), has to be predicted automatically from audio-visual recordings (USoM corpus).

Detecting Depression with AI Sub-Challenge (DDS)
The AVEC 2019 DDS is a major extension of the AVEC 2016 DSC, where the level of depression severity (PHQ-8 questionnaire) was assessed from audio-visual recordings of US Army veterans interacting with a virtual agent conducting a clinical interview and driven by a human as a Wizard-of-Oz (DAIC-WOZ corpus). The DAIC corpus contains new recordings of US Army veterans with the virtual agent being, this time, fully driven by artificial intelligence, i.e., without any human intervention. Those new recordings are used as a test partition for the DDS.

Cross-cultural Emotion Sub-Challenge (CES)
The AVEC 2019 CES is a major extension of the AVEC 2018 CES, where dimensions of emotion were inferred from audio-visual recordings collected “in-the-wild”, i.e., with standard webcams and at home/work place, in a cross-cultural setting: German culture => Hungarian culture (SEWA corpus). This dataset now includes data collected from new participants with Chinese culture, which is used as a test set for the AVEC 2019 CES.

*Challenge registration*

In order to participate in the Challenge, please register your team by using this form: https://forms.gle/QBxJMNA3igYZo61k8.

*Contributions to AVEC 2019*

We encourage 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. to the topic of these challenges, especially:

- Audio/Video/Physiological-based Health/Emotion Recognition
- Multimodal Representation Learning
- Transfer Learning, Semi-supervised and Unsupervised Learning
- Personalised Health/Emotion Recognition
- Context in Health/Emotion Recognition
- Cross-cultural and Holistic Recognition
- Multiple Rater Ambiguity and Asynchrony

*Important Dates*

Training and development sets available:
April 29, 2019
Test sets available:
June 9, 2019
Paper submission:
June 30, 2019 (Anywhere on Earth)
Notification of acceptance:
August 5, 2019
Camera ready paper:
August 12, 2019
Workshop:
October (date T.B.C.), 2019

*Organisers*
Fabien Ringeval, Université Grenoble Alpes, CNRS
Björn Schuller, Imperial College London/University of Augsburg
Michel Valstar, University of Nottingham
Nicholas Cummins, University of Augsburg
Roddy Cowie, Queen's University Belfast
Maja Pantic, Imperial College London/University of Twente