HUMAINE Association launched

The global opening beyond the European perspective was symbolically asserted by the fact that the first person to sign the HUMAINE constitution was Prof. Rosalind Picard, Director of Affective Computing research at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, MA. The constitution was also signed by Dr. Marc Schröder of DFKI, Germany, and Prof. Roddy Cowie of Queen's University, Belfast.

The Association aims to provide a framework that allows people in affective/emotion oriented computing worldwide to act as a community – know each other, act together when they need to, and influence other groups. One of the activities planned is the continued support for HUMAINE's award-winning web portal, acting as a central source of news and background information. The association will organise a scientific conference every two years. Special Interest Groups within the Association will pursue content discussions in a range of topic areas, including research on ethics, on gestures, on natural-language processing, and others.

The HUMAINE Association portal will provide a range of services for individuals, such as a web presence, access to data, and an email news service; special interest groups will be provided with a working folder, a mailing list, and a discussion forum or a blog. Conferences, workshops and research projects in the area of emotion-oriented computing can be given a web presence on the portal.

The Association will seek to establish links with related research organisations. Formal elections for the executive committee will be held at the Second International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction, held 12-14 September in Lisbon, Portugal.

All information about registering as member, preparations for the elections etc will become available shortly in the following folder:

http://emotion-research.net/association