VR/AR Conference 2018:
Virtual & Augmented Reality to Enhance Learning and Teaching in Higher Education
September 12th, 2018
Swansea University
Swansea, UK
http://www.swansea.ac.uk/vr-in-teaching/
http://www.swansea.ac.uk/vr-in-teaching/vr-conference/

Submission deadline: June 8, 2018

Swansea will be hosting our first VR/AR conference on September 12th 2018. The theme will be Virtual and Augmented Reality to Enhance Learning and Teaching in Higher Education.

Read more on Call: VR/AR Conference: VR and AR to Enhance Learning and Teaching in Higher Education…

Call for Papers

When Robots Think.
Interdisciplinary Views on Intelligent Automation
November 14–16, 2018
Münster, Germany
http://iasymposium.rwth-aachen.de/

Submission deadline for talk abstracts: July 31st
Submission deadline for poster abstracts: August 15th

In Western societies, we are surrounded by artificially intelligent systems. Most of these systems are embedded in online platforms like Facebook. But embodiment of AI, be it by voice (Siri, Alexa, Cortana) or by actual physical embodiment (as in the case of robots) give artificially intelligent systems another dimension in terms of their impact on how we perceive these systems, how they shape our communication with them and with fellow humans and how we live and work together. The purpose of the conference is to bring together some of the best national and international researchers to discuss and evaluate the state of the art of intelligent automation and its impact on individuals and society. To achieve this goal, the conference is divided into five sections: Read more on Call: “When Robots Think. Interdisciplinary Views on Intelligent Automation.” (Conference)…

Call for Papers

“Human Computer Interaction in Education” a special issue of Multimodal Technologies and Interaction (ISSN 2414-4088)

Guest Editors:
Dr. Omar Mubin, Western Sydney University, Australia
Dr. Mohammad Obaid, Uppsala University, Sweden

Submission Deadline: 28th June, 2018

OVERVIEW:

Technology-enabled education and pedagogy has, in recent times, gained ascendancy due to the advancements in digitisation and the overall acceptance of blended forms of learning. Learning mechanisms driven by technology (MOOCs, tablets, smart devices, social media, intelligent artefacts) provide a number of overarching benefits to the learner’s experience (such as engagement, proficiency, ease of use, profiling and customisation). Gradually, the mediation between teacher, student and technology has extended beyond 2D mediums to 3D and physical embodiments such as humanoid robots and agents. With the uptake of such novel forms of interaction both in the classroom and at home, several key questions are now being raised related to their effectiveness, particularly due to saturation, technical considerations, cultural differences, ensuing isolation of the teacher and learner distraction amongst others. Therefore, in order to discuss these and many other similar interesting viewpoints; in this Special Issue we call for submissions related to the entire spectrum of educational technology, specifically related to the design, implementation and evaluation of such forms of digital advancements.

TOPICS OF INTEREST:

• Educational Robots
• Educational Technology
• Inclusive Educational Technology
• HCI In Education (HCI Curriculum)
• STEM Learning
• Novel Interaction Methods and Techniques for Education (VR/AR, Robots, Mobile Computing, Tabletops, NUI’s, Haptics and Tangible artifacts)
• User studies/case studies/Reflections on Educational Technology
• Overview or survey articles on Educational Technology
• HCI related aspects in Blended Learning and other digital mediums such as social media
• Serious Games (for Education)
• Adaptive Educational Technologies
• Educational Technology from a Teacher/Tutor/Instructor Perspective

Read more on Call: “Human Computer Interaction in Education” special issue of Multimodal Technologies and Interaction…

Call for Workshop Proposals
Media Architecture Biennale 2018 Workshops
Beijing, China
13-16 November 2018
https://mab18.org/

Abstract submission deadline: May, 15th 2018

We are looking for people who are excited about the role of media and technology in the urban environment and want to share this excitement with an interdisciplinary audience.

The Media Architecture Biennale is a biannual event, featuring workshops, a conference and an exhibition, that attracts interaction designers, lighting designers, architects, artists, researchers and industry practitioners.

The workshops at the Media Architecture Biennale are an interactive, dynamic forum leading up to the conference and exhibition, with an opportunity for exchanging ideas, forming communities, sharing knowledge, inspirations, getting in touch, prototyping and networking.

The next Media Architecture Biennale will be held in Beijing, China, 13-16 November 2018. We welcome workshops on academic research, art and industry themes.

TOPICS OF INTEREST INCLUDE:

• Urban HCI
• Urban prototyping
• Urban lighting
• Digital placemaking
• Participatory media architecture
• Digital cities
• Media facades
• Hacking urban spaces
• Digital street art
• Robotic Media Architecture
• Lighting technologies and products
• Industry case studies involving media architecture

TYPES OF WORKSHOPS:

• Theoretical discourse / urban observations
• Hands-on activities / co-creation / prototyping
• Show-and-tell / products and projects / Q&A

For inspiration, please have a look at the workshops held at MAB 2014 and MAB 2016:

http://mab14.mediaarchitecture.org/category/workshops-c/

http://mab16.org/pages/ workshops_guide.php Read more on Call: Media Architecture Biennale 2018 Workshops…

CALL FOR PAPERS AND PRESENTATIONS

Special Track on X-Reality & Immersive Learning Environments
Jointly organised with the Immersive Learning Research Network (iLRN)
IEEE TALE 2018, 4-7 Dec 2018, Wollongong, Australia

Full call available at: http://tale2018.org/xreality

Deadline: 11 June 2018

The Special Track on X-Reality and Immersive Learning Environments at IEEE TALE 2018 will focus on the use of virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality and related technologies for creating environments and experiences that excite, inspire and engage learners in immersive ways. Of interest are reports of both research studies and applications covering the entire spectrum of immersive platform types, including desktop, mobile, wearable and room-based (e.g., CAVE). Authors and presenters are encouraged to think creatively in terms of how they might frame their work to accommodate different conceptions of and perspectives on immersion. Read more on Call: X-Reality & Immersive Learning Environments at IEEE TALE 2018…

Call for Papers: ACM UMAP Workshop – HAAPIE 2018

The 3nd International Workshop on Human Aspects in Adaptive and Personalized Interactive Environments, in conjunction with the 26th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (ACM UMAP 2018), Singapore, 8-11 July 2018

Full details are available online: http://haapie.cs.ucy.ac.cy

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission deadline: 20 April 2018
Notification: 15 May 2018
Camera-ready: 27 May 2018

MOTIVATION & GOALS

State-of-the-art approaches in adaptation and personalization research consider user models that mostly maintain information regarding the “traditional” user characteristics (i.e., experience, knowledge, interests, context), and related contextual or technology aspects (i.e., displays, connectivity, processing power). While modeling these factors has shown significant improvements and benefits to the end-users in terms of user experience, there is an urgent need for a step change signifying the further engagement into research that will produce more holistic human-centered practices. The vision is to highlight the “human-in-the-loop” approach considering intrinsic user characteristics and abilities, like perceptual, personality, visual, cognitive and emotional factors adhering the theories of individual differences. Moreover, recent studies show the need for broadening the scope of diversity parameters to include characteristics such as motivation, self-actualization, and socio-cultural differences.

The overarching goal of HAAPIE 2018 is to bring together researchers and practitioners working in areas of human aspects in adaptation and personalization, and aims to:

• Explore state-of-the-art and new implicit and explicit methods and techniques for modeling a broad range of human factors of users and behaviors – both separately and in possible combinations (e.g., cognitive abilities and age; motivation and cultural differences);
• Explore personalization methods, computational intelligence algorithms, recommendation models, and real-time paradigms that can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of human-centered user tasks and interventions;
• Compare challenges and experiences in different real world contexts and applications (e.g., decision support, learning, wellbeing, security), where a holistic view on human aspects is needed to provide a positive user experience; and
• Identify theoretical and computational models for the design, development and evaluation of human aspects in adaptation and personalization.

The added value will be to shape new human-centered adaptive interactive environments and personalized platforms that can contribute towards viable long-term solutions.

TOPICS OF INTEREST

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Human-centered Modeling, Adaptation Methods and Techniques
• Influence of Human Factors on Interactive Systems for Personalization
• Usage of Human Factors for Personalization
• Implicit and Explicit Detection of Human Factors for Personalization
• Human-centered Algorithms for Content Recommendation and Delivery
• Novel Human-centered Interaction Concepts and User Interfaces
• Individual Differences (Personality, Cognition, Gender, Age, etc.)
• Synergy of Affective and Human Cognitive Factors
• Modeling Groups and Communities of Diverse Users
• Evaluation of Human Aspects in Adaptation and Personalization
• Personalized Access to Services Content
• User Experience in Human-centered Systems
• Cultural and Language Diversity and Adaptation
• Age-specific Personalization and Adaptation
• Adaptation and Personalization for Users with Special Needs
• Personalization and Adaptation for Behavior Change
• User Context Awareness
• Human Aspects in Personalized Internet of Things Applications
• User-centric Cyber-Physical-Social Adaptive Systems
• Human Aspects in Social Adaptive Robots
• Adaptation and Personalization in Usable Privacy and Security
• Privacy & Ethical Aspects of Modeling Human Factors in Personalization Systems

Read more on Call: Human Aspects in Adaptive and Personalized Interactive Environments (ACM UMAP 2018 Workshop)…

Call for Papers

2018 Workshop on Non-Player Characters and Social Believability

At Foundations of Digital Games (FDG) 2018
Malmö University
Sweden
August 7-10 2018)
http://fdg2018.org/

Workshop website: http://www.npc-workshop.org/cfp-2018.php

Paper submission deadline: May 21 2018

The 2018 workshop on Non-Player Characters and Social Believability intends to be a point of interaction for researchers and game developers interested in modeling, discussing, and developing systems for Non-Player Character (NPC) social behavior and social affordances. This can include behaviour generation based on social and behavioural science theories and models, systems and approaches for social believability, social affordances when interacting with NPCs, and more. We invite participants from any discipline in order to create a broad spectrum of approaches to the area.

In the context of this workshop, NPCs in games are not limited to opponents and allies, but can play any role. From the beginning of digital games, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been part of the main idea of games containing acting entities, which is to provide the player with “worthy” opponents (NPCs). However, as the medium has evolved the requirements on the underlying technologies have changed. The ever expanding complexity of modern games has increased the demands put on the NPCs as believable characters, especially if they are to cooperate with human players. In particular, three facets of NPC behavior are of concern for the workshop: (1) the interplay between intelligent behavior that is task-related, (2) the emotions and meanings that may be attached to the events in the game world, and (3) the social positioning and interaction of deliberating entities. This workshop aims to address this by putting forward demonstrations of work in the integration of these facets aspects of NPC behavior, as well as models and theories that can be used for the emotional and social aspects, and for their integration for generative use.

We welcome submissions rooted in game technologies, computer science, social science, art, design, and the humanities. The workshop will be dedicated to demonstration and discussion, with time for collaboration and comparison of theory, method, practice, and results in fruitful cross- and interdisciplinary meetings.

The workshop is co-located and organised with the 2018 Foundations of Digital Games (FDG) conference in Malmö, Sweden. The exact workshop date is TBD, but will take place sometime during the conference (August 7-10 2018).

TOPICS

This workshop accepts submissions related to NPCs and social believability construed broadly. Topics of interest include but are not limited to the following:

• designs created to explore hypotheses
• realized prototypes, demos, and applications
• technological approaches: then, now, and the future
• behavior modeling and behavior design
• philosophical approaches to sociality and believable behavior
• generative or procedural content
• trade-offs between autonomous characters and control over storylines, and dialogue
• authoring social behavior
• social interactions involving groups
• connecting contextual modeling to animation and speech/sound
• provocative ideas

Read more on Call: Workshop on Non-Player Characters and Social Believability at FDG 2018…

Call for Papers

Workshop on Intelligent Conversational Agents in Home and Geriatric Care Applications
Held in conjunction with Federated AI Meeting (FAIM)
14th-15th of July, 2018
Stockholm
http://taln.upf.edu/pages/ica_ws/

Submission Deadline: May 15, 2018

Communication is of crucial importance in home and geriatric care. Caregivers are expected not only to facilitate information, guidance and instruction, but also to interact as trustworthy companions of caretakers. In the light of the fact that more and more individuals are increasingly in need of home and geriatric care, ensuring adequate service for all has become a societal challenge. With the increasing maturity of verbal and non-verbal communication understanding and generation technologies, knowledge-based dialogue management techniques, external knowledge acquisition, and virtual character and robot design, questions regarding the use of intelligent conversational agents in home and geriatric applications has become increasingly important. At the same time, the home and geriatric care context implies specific technical and ethical challenges with respect to language, social behaviour, data and knowledge management, etc. An increasing number of research initiatives address these challenges. The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers working on different aspects of intelligent conversational agents and related fields, practitioners who deploy such agents in the context of home and geriatric care applications, and critical users, who can report about their experience with the use of conversational agents within these applications. Apart from cutting edge technical submissions, contributions that address the challenge of the use of agents in home and geriatric care from the ethical perspective are welcome. The topics of interest include, but are not restricted to:

• Specifics of the home and geriatric care context for conversational agents
• Ethical challenges in home and geriatric care applications
• Design of intelligent conversational agents for home and geriatric care applications
• Personalized agent embodiments
• The use of virtual and augmented reality techniques in home and geriatric care applications
• Personalized knowledge and data management in conversational agents
• Knowledge modelling in conversational agents
• Question answering techniques for conversational agents
• Semantic data fusion and reasoning for multimodal interaction with elderly
• Dialogue management for highly unpredictable conversation shifts
• Adaptation of the language style and vocabulary of conversational agents to a targeted user
• Emotional behaviour of conversational agents in emotionally charged contexts
• Multimodal interaction strategies in conversations with elderly
• Conversational agent interaction with mentally challenged users

SUBMISSIONS Read more on Call: Workshop on Intelligent Conversational Agents in Home and Geriatric Care Applications…

CALL FOR PAPERS, IDEAS, and PARTICIPATION

First IEEE International Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Industries (ai4i 2018)
September 26-28, 2018
The Hills Hotel
Laguna Hills, California
http://www.ai4i.org

Workshop proposals deadline: May 14, 2018
(Regular, Short, Abstract) Paper submission deadline: June 17, 2018

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is concerned with computing technologies that allow machines to see, hear, talk, think, learn, and solve problems. On one hand it allows business decisions to be driven by real-time models that enable unprecedented levels of accuracy and efficiency. On the other hand, general and domain specific problem solving can be integrated by semantic technologies. In addition, business-business, business-customer, and customer-customer may be interconnected in a revolutionary way to support new business models with elevated customer experiences.

The first International Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Industries (ai4i 2018), technically sponsored by IEEE, is an international forum focusing on incorporating artificial intelligence into business products and services that may be brought to the market in the near future. The conference invites researchers, practitioners, entrepreneurs, investors, and users to submit technical papers, white papers, ideas, needs, and demos for synergetic interactions.

The conference is organized in two dimensions, technology and industry, so that technologies can be mapped to applications in vertical as well as general industrial segments. The technology dimension includes, but is not limited to, the following:

• Semantic and cognitive aspects in different industries
• Innovative operations using artificial intelligence
• Immersive environments
• Multimodal interactions
• Human/agent interactions
• Domain specific problem solving
• Machine and deep learning
• Modelling of behaviour and activity generation
• Big data and analytics
• Dialogue modeling and generation
• System components of intelligent platforms for industries
• Robotic intelligence

The application dimension consists of specific industries such as business, biomedicine, education, entertainment, arts and humanities, manufacturing, sciences, engineering, and agriculture.

The conference proceedings will be submitted for inclusion to the IEEE Computer Society Press. Technical papers with distinguished quality presented at the conference will be selected for publication in internationally renowned journals. Read more on Call: First IEEE International Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Industries (ai4i 2018)…

Call for Papers
2nd International Workshop on the ApplicatioN of Semantic WEb technologies in Robotics – AnSWeR 2018
Co-located with the International Semantic Web Conference 2018 (ISWC 2018)

Date: October the 8th, 2018
Venue: Monterey, California, US (co-located with ISWC2018)
Hashtag: #answer2018
Twitter: @answerworkshop
Site: http://answer.kmi.open.ac.uk/

Workshop chairs:

• Emanuele Bastianelli – The Open University, UK
• Masoumeh (Iran) Mansouri – Örebro University, Sweden
• Ilaria Tiddi – The Open University, UK

Steering Committee:

• Mathieu d’Aquin – Insight Centre for Data Analytics, Ireland
• Daniele Nardi – Sapienza University of Rome, Italy

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission deadline: Friday, June 1st
Notification to authors: Wednesday, June 27th
Camera-ready due on: Monday, July 16th
Workshop day: Monday, October 8th

DESCRIPTION

Autonomous mobile agents and robotics in general are experiencing a growing interest due to a number of factors, e.g. the advancements in Artificial Intelligence, Knowledge Management, Computer Vision; the amount of new efficient techniques for basic robotic tasks (perception, manipulation, navigation etc.); and the increasing number of cost-accessible robotic platforms in the market. As a consequence, robots will be required to achieve more and more complex tasks, hence exposing the ability of dealing with different sources of knowledge about the world in order to improve their behaviours.

Robotics community has started considering the problem of enabling robots to use sources of heterogeneous knowledge rather recently (see projects as KnowRob [http://knowrob.org/] and Robobrain (http://robobrain.me/]). As a consequence, it can be argued that semantic technologies should also have a role to play, as they allow to model, mine, manage and exploit knowledge from and for the Web.

It is therefore important to understand how the Semantic Web community is interfacing with Robotics, and whether it can be actually beneficial. The first edition of AnSWeR in 2017 has promoted and triggered the dialogue between the two communities that are working on such connected topics. Although a large attention has been obtained, encouraging us to maintain and evolve the conversation, a further effort is needed. The goal of the second edition of the AnSWeR workshop is thus to strengthen this dialogue, giving researchers and practitioners the opportunity to compare and debate on common problems, bridging the gap between these overlapping, but mostly isolated communities.

We expect original, high-quality contributions embracing both the general topics of semantic technologies and Robotics. Researchers whose work have reached a certain level of maturity or have already developed impactful applications are invited to submit full papers. Initial works, ongoing challenges, or not yet fully evaluated systems are also welcome, and can be submitted in the form of short papers, position papers and demos.

Authors are encouraged, but not limited, to consider the following set of topics:

• Usability of available Semantic Web resources in Robotics
• Semantic methods to support the development of robotic systems
• Representation and reasoning for Robotics
• Knowledge representation systems for robots
• Semantic solutions to enable spatio-temporal planning and reasoning
• Ontologies and standardisation of terminology for Robotics applications
• Semantic Maps
• Knowledge acquisition in robotic applications
• Integration of local robotic knowledge with data from the Web
• Planning and navigation using semantic data and knowledge
• Robotics within the Web of Things
• Knowledge and perception
• Semantic technologies to support Cloud Robotics systems
• Semantic approaches for entity linking, grounding and anchoring
• Concrete use cases of working robotic systems exploiting Semantic Web approaches
• Future trends at the intersection of Robotics and the (Semantic) Web

Read more on Call: 2nd International Workshop on the ApplicatioN of Semantic WEb technologies in Robotics – AnSWeR 2018…