AFFINE - Affective Interaction in Natural Environments:

Real-time affect analysis and interpretation for virtual agents and robots

Chania, Crete, Greece, October 24, 2008
Post-conference workshop of ICMI 2008
http://www.icmi2008.org


The First AFFINE workshop on Affective Interaction in Natural Environments will be hosted at the Tenth International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI 2008) to be held in Chania, Crete, on the 24th of October 2008, following the main conference. The duration of the workshop is one day.

Workshop scope and aim

A vital requirement for social robots and virtual agents is the ability to infer the affective and mental states of humans, so as to be able to engage in and behave appropriately during sustained social interactions. Examples include ensuring that the user is interested in maintaining the interaction or providing suitable empathic responses. A fundamental component in these 'mentalizing' and 'empathizing' capabilities is the interpretation of human behavior from sensory input, which must be conducted in a timely manner.

This workshop will consider real-time computational techniques for the recognition and interpretation of human verbal and non-verbal behavior, models of 'mentalizing' and 'empathizing' for integrative representation and processing of input data, and implementation to support human-agent and human-robot interaction frameworks.

In particular, the workshop seeks to bring together researchers working on the real-time interpretation of user behavior to produce mid- or high-level state descriptors, from basic emotions to more complex appraisals or mental states (e.g. agreement and interest, or blends of several emotions) with those who wish to apply this capacity as part of a 'social perception' module or equivalent in social robot and virtual agent interaction frameworks.

Workshop topics

• Multimodal affect recognition (facial expressions, body language, speech, physiological, etc.)
• Perception-action loops in agents/robots
• Cognitive and affective mentalizing / theory of mind
• Social appraisal
• Visual attention
• Theories of emotion
• Emotion and cognitive state representation
• Context awareness
• Cognitive modelling of user
• User engagement
• Evaluation of affective interaction and user-centred design
• Applications: interactive games, empathic interfaces, etc.

Submissions

Authors are invited to submit papers (2-page abstract) in the areas of interest of the workshop.

Submitted papers must be in PDF format and conform to the ACM publication format (see http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html).

Authors of accepted papers will be required to submit a 4 to 6 pages camera ready paper.

Accepted papers will be presented at the workshop either by oral or poster presentation and will appear in a CD of the workshop proceedings.

Important dates

2-page abstract submission deadline: July 7, 2008
Notification of acceptance: August 1, 2008
Camera ready paper: September 12, 2008
Workshop: October 24, 2008

Workshop chairs

Ginevra Castellano (Queen Mary University of London, UK)
Kostas Karpouzis (ICCS / NTUA, Greece)
Christopher Peters (Université de Paris 8, France / Trinity College Dublin, Ireland)
Jean-Claude Martin (LIMSI-CNRS, France)

Program Committee

Nadia Bianchi-Berthouze (University College London, UK)
Antonio Camurri (DIST-University of Genova, Italy)
Lola Canamero (University of Hertfordshire, UK)
Roddy Cowie (Queen’s University Belfast, UK)
Kerstin Dautenhahn (University of Hertfordshire, UK)
Dirk Heylen (University of Twente, The Netherlands)
Stefanos Kollias (ICCS / NTUA, Greece)
Peter William McOwan (Queen Mary University of London, UK)
Ana Paiva (INESC-ID, Portugal)
Maja Pantic (Imperial College, UK / University of Twente, The Netherlands)
Catherine Pelachaud (Université de Paris 8, France)
Marc Schroeder (DFKI, Germany)
Asimina Vasalou (Imperial College, UK)

Contacts

Ginevra Castellano (ginevra at dcs.qmul.ac.uk)
Kostas Karpouzis (kkarpou at cs.ntua.gr)
Christopher Peters (peters at iut.univ-paris8.fr)
Jean-Claude Martin (martin at limsi.fr)

With the support of the Humaine Association and the FP7 LIREC EU project (http://lirec.eu/).