Workshops

ACII 2019 invites contributions in the form of papers, to the following workshops:

• Se-themo: Workshop on Social emotions, theories and models

  Contact

  • Ruth Aylett, HWU, UK

   

  Organizers

  • Patrick Gebhard, DFKI, DE
  • Malte Jung, Cornell University, USA
  • Arvid Kappas, Jacobs University, DE
  • Iolanda Leite, KTH, SE
  • Ana Paiva, University of Lisbon, PT

  • Brian Parkinson, University of Oxford, UK
  • Thusha Rajendran, Heriot-Watt University, UK
  • Christiana Tsiourti, TU Wien, AU
  • Nutchanon Yongsatianchot, University of Glasgow, UK

   

  Abstract

  Social agents with both graphical and robotic embodiments are being researched on an increasing scale, with applications in public interaction. education, health and therapeutic areas. This raises quite sharply both a requirement for the detection of social emotions – whether emotion that is socially and culturally regulated or emotion in group settings – and the modelling and expressing of such emotions on the social agent side. The aim of this workshop is to bring theorists and modellers together to the benefit of both.
   

• Workshop on emotions and emergent states in groups (EMERGent)

  Contact

  • Giovanna Varni, LTCI, Télécom-ParisTech, Université Paris-Saclay, France
  • Naveen Kumar, Disney Research Los Angeles, USA

   

  Organizers

  • Cristina Segalin – Disney Research Los Angeles, USA
  • James Kennedy – Disney Research Los Angeles, USA
  • Mohamed Chetouani – ISIR, Sorbonne Université, Paris, France
  • Joseph A. Allen – University of Nebraska, Omaha, USA

  • Maurizio Mancini – University College Cork, Ireland
  • Gualtiero Volpe – Universita di Genova, Italy
  • Tanaya Guha – University of Warwick, U.K.
  • Samuel Mascarenhas – Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal

   

  Abstract

  The study of affect in groups, although a major goal of affective computing, has received relatively less attention compared to modeling individual affect. This is primarily because studying affect in an interactive, multiparty setting is more complex, and often, not very well defined outside specific applications. Moreover, affective computing has yet not addressed group affective dynamics as a potential driver of emergent states. These include pivotal group phenomena such as trust, conflict, and cohesion, and evolve over time as group members explicitly and implicitly interact to coordinate their actions and achieve objectives. This workshop will provide a unique occasion to gather researchers and practitioners working on approaches for sensing, analyzing, and modeling group emotion and emergent states from a multidisciplinary perspective, including psychological, ethnological, sociological, pedagogical, and computational viewpoints.
   
  Submission deadline: June 17, 2019 (midnight PST)
  Link to workshop website: https://groupemotion.github.io
   

• 4th International Workshop on Emotion and Sentiment in Social and Expressive Media (ESSEM2019): Media and Arts for Inclusive, Fair and Reflective Societies

  Contact

  • Rossana Damiano, University of Torino, Dipartimento di Informatica, Italy

   

  Organizers

  • Cristina Bosco, University of Torino, Dipartimento di Informatica, Italy
  • Erik Cambria, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
  • Chloé Clavel, LTCI, Telecom-ParisTech, Paris-Saclay University, Paris, France

  • Viviana Patti, University of Torino, Dipartimento di Informatica, Italy
  • Paolo Rosso, Universitat Politècnica de València, Valencia, Spain

   

  Abstract

  The advent of social media has brought about new paradigms of interaction where the subjective dimension moves to the foreground, opening the way to the emergence of an affective component within a dynamic corpus of digitized contents created and enriched by the users. In parallel, in the digital age, artistic creation and self-expression are more and more intertwined with a social dimension, ranging from co-creation paradigms to interactive art forms. The ESSEM workshop is especially devoted to the discussion of implications of using social and expressive media for supporting an inclusive, fair and reflective society. In particular, we are interested in the reflection brought about by media and arts, as forms of emotional communication, about the changes and conflicts occurring in society: models and methods to detect, measure and study social phenomena in media though affect; artistic expression as a way to reverberate collective sentiment and promote awareness of ongoing transformations. Therefore, a major focus will be given to models and applications that can impact on monitoring, analyzing inequalities and on supporting the implementation of countermeasures to foster inclusion and fairness. Inequalities are indeed an increasingly spreading phenomena in combination with the pervasivity of social media, which may play a key role with respect to exclusion of youngers (cyberbullying), women (misogyny), and immigrants (hate speech), just to cite few related challenges for the ESSEM community.
   
  Paper submission deadline: June 8, 2019
   

• Workshop on Recognition, Treatment and Management of Pain and Distress, and the EmoPain Behaviour Recognition Challenge

  Contact

  • Dr. Steffen Walter, University of Ulm, Germany
  • Prof Nadia Bianchi-Berthouze, University College London (UCL), UK

   

  Organizers

  • Dr Hane Aung, University of East Anglia, UK
  • Dr Nic Lane, University of Oxford, UK
  • Daniel Lopez-Martinez, MIT, USA
  • Dr Hongying Meng, Brunel University London, UK
  • Prof. Dr. Rosalind W. Picard, MIT Media Lab, USA

  • Dr Michel Valstar, University of Nottingham, UK
  • Dr Amanda Williams, University College London,UK
  • Dr Joy Egede, University of Nottingham, UK – Data Challenge chair
  • Dr Temitayo Olugbade, University College London, UK – Data Challenge chair
  • Chongyang Wang, University College London, UK – Data challenge chair

   

  Abstract

  Pain and related emotions are difficult to measure in patients with restricted communicative abilities and even in people that can communicate their sensations it is unfeasible to continuously ask them to report those sensations in order to personalize their therapy. This workshop aims to bring together researchers working in the area of recognition, treatment and management of pain and related emotional states. It is comprised of two parts. The first part invites research submissions covering various topics related to technology for pain management. The second part invites researchers to participate in the EmoPain challenge to foster research in the automatic recognition of pain-related multimodal behaviour in people suffering from chronic pain. The challenge is based on the multimodal EmoPain dataset (facial expression, movement and muscle activity) developed as part of the EmoPain project (www.emo-pain.ac.uk). Two invited speakers and a final interdisciplinary panel will complement the presentation and further contribute to set a route map for designing effective technology for the management of pain and related states.
   

• International Workshop on Social & Emotion AI for Industry (SEAIxI)

  Contact

  • Olga Perepelkina, Neurodata Lab LLC

   

  Organizers

  • Alessandro Vinciarelli, University of Glasgow, UK

   

  Abstract

  The main strategic consulting companies (KPMG, McKinsey, Gartner Group, etc.), the most important international think-tanks (World Economic Forum, International Federation of Robotics, etc.), and the CEOs of the major ICT companies (IBM, Microsoft, etc.) consider the lack of social intelligence to be the last obstacle between AI-driven technologies and the achievement of their full potential in the everyday life of the users. In such a perspective, the aim of SEAIxI is to bridge the gap between academic and industrial research on Social & Emotion AI, the domain aimed at the development of technologies, machines and artificial agents with the ability to deal appropriately with users’ affect, attitudes, intentions, feelings, personality and expectations. The workshop welcomes contributions that address, among others, questions such as “How can socially and emotionally intelligent systems be used in real-world scenarios?”, “What are the business cases that are being (or going to be) developed?”, “What are the challenges underlying the transfer of such systems to industry and application relevant settings?”.
   

• Machine Learning for the Diagnosis and Treatment of Affective Disorders

  Contact

  • Anja Thieme, Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK

   

  Organizers

  • Danielle Belgrave, Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK
  • Gavin Doherty, Trinity College Dublin, IRL
  • Tad Hirsch, Northeastern University, US

  • Munmun De Choudhury, Georgia Institute of Technology, US
  • Mary Czerwinski, Microsoft Research Redmond, US
  • Akane Sano, Rice University, US

   

  Abstract

  In recent years, there has been an increase in interest and explorations of the use of machine learning (ML) to assist in the diagnosis of mental health problems; and for improving access to, engagement with, and the outcomes of, therapeutic treatment. Research has started to explore the identification of mental health problems through inferences about peoples’ behaviours on social media, online searches, or mobile phone app uses; as well as varied approaches to assess, or continuously monitor, a person’s mental health and related symptoms by measuring sleep, mood, stress, social or physical activity via audio, visual or physiological signal processing. Despite great potential, the realization of effective ML-enabled applications for mental health remains a hugely challenging area for research and development. This workshop will bring together an inter-disciplinary group of researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to discuss the unique opportunities and challenges for developing effective, ethical and trustworthy ML- approaches and interventions for the diagnosis and treatment of affective disorders. For more details, please visit the workshop website: http://mlformentalhealth.com/index.html
   

• The 5th International Workshop on Affective Social Multimedia Computing (ASMMC 2019)

  Contact

  • Dong-Yan HUANG, UBTech Robotics Corp, China

   

  Organizers

  • Björn SCHULLER, University of Augsburg, Germany, and, Imperial College London, London/U.K, and, audEERING GmbH, Gilching/Germany
  • Jianhua TAO, National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition (NLPR), Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China

  • Lei XIE, Shannxi Provincial Key Lab of Speech and Image Information Processing (SAIIP), School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, China
  • Jie YANG, Division of Information and Intelligent Systems, National Science Foundation (NSF), USA

   

  Abstract

  Affective social multimedia computing is an emergent research topic for both affective computing and multimedia research communities. Social multimedia is fundamentally changing how we communicate, interact, and collaborate with other people in our daily lives. Comparing with well-organized broadcast news and professionally made videos such as commercials, TV shows, and movies, social multimedia media computing imposes great challenges to research communities. Social multimedia contains much affective information. Effective extraction of affective information from social multimedia can greatly help social multimedia computing (e.g., processing, index, retrieval, and understanding). Although much progress have been made in traditional multimedia research on multimedia content analysis, indexing, and retrieval based on subjective concepts such as emotion, aesthetics, and preference, affective social multimedia computing is a new research area. The affective social multimedia computing aims to proceed affective information from social multi-media. For massive and heterogeneous social media data, the research requires multidisciplinary understanding of content and perceptual cues from social multimedia. From the multimedia perspective, the research relies on the theoretical and technological findings in affective computing, machine learning, pattern recognition, signal/multimedia processing, computer vision, speech processing, behavior and social psychology. Affective analysis of social multimedia is attracting growing attention from industry and businesses that provide social networking sites, content-sharing services, distribute and host the media. This workshop focuses on the analysis of affective signals in interaction and social multimedia (e.g., twitter, wechat, weibo, youtube, facebook, etc).