Emotion in Human-Computer Interaction

Motivation
Emotion plays an important role in our interactions with people and computers in everyday life.  Emotions, some believe, are what make our interactions human. An increasing number of conferences, symposia, workshops, journals and books address the subject of emotions and their role in Human-Computer Interaction, including workshops at the last two HCI conferences.

This recent affective awareness is leading designers and HCI researchers to try and understand the subtleties of emotion and its effect on our behaviours. This is encouraging for a young field of research, and there exist many exciting directions where this field may be expanded. The specific areas of interest span recognition and synthesis of emotion in face and body, emotion sensors, speech specifics, and the influence of emotion on information processing and decision-making, interaction metaphors, design aspects, and many more. Despite these different areas of interest, there are common obstacles each of us face in our work.

What you can expect
This workshop will meet the requirements of individuals working in the different fields affected by emotion, giving them a podium to raise their questions and work with like-minded people of various disciplines on common subjects.  It will use predominantly small group work, rather than being presentation-based and will be focussed on selected topics based on the contributions.

With the workshop being very interactive and focused on selected topics, it is expected that the outcome of the workshop will be even more tangible than its two predecessors, which themselves resulted in a Springer book to be published this year. We aim for citable outputs this year as well.

Contribute!
Contributions are encouraged to the following topics:

• How do applications currently make use of emotions?
• What makes applications that support affective interactions successful?
• How do we know if affective interactions are successful, and how can we measure this success?
• What value might affective applications, affective systems, and affective interaction have?
• What technology is currently available for sensing affective states?
• How reliable is sensing technology?
• Are there reliable and replicable processes to include emotion in HCI design projects?
• What opportunities and risks are there in designing affective applications?

Submission
To become part of this discussion please submit an extended abstract of your work, thoughts, or demo description. Case studies describing current applications or prototypes are strongly encouraged, as well as presentations of products or prototypes that you have developed.

The abstract should be limited to about 800 words and be in PDF format.
Accepted contributions will be published on the workshop's homepage with the possibility to extend them to short or full papers.

Please send your contribution to submissions at emotion-in-hci dot net

Please note that registration to the HCI conference is required in order to take part in the workshop (at least for the day of the workshop). Early bird registration deadline is 5 August (link to registration site)

Important dates
2007 July 18                 Submission of position papers (800 words)
2007 August 01             Notification of acceptance
2007 August 05             Early bird registration
2007 September 4        Workshop

Organizers
Christian Peter,  Fraunhofer IGD Rostock, Germany
Russell Beale,     University of Birmingham, UK
Lesley Axelrod,   Brunel University, UK
Elizabeth Crane, University of Michigan, USA