5^th International Workshop on Affective Interaction in Natural Environments (AFFINE):

Interacting with Affective Artefacts in the Wild

http://www.image.ntua.gr/affine/

Geneva, 2 September 2013

Satellite event of ACII 2013 (http://www.acii2013.org/)

A vital requirement for social robots, virtual agents, adaptive games and smart mobile technology is the ability to infer the affective and mental states of humans and provide appropriate output during sustained social interactions, and to do so in a timely manner. Examples include ensuring that the user is interested in maintaining the interaction or providing suitable empathic responses through the display of facial expressions, gestures or generation of speech. This workshop will cover real-time computational techniques for the recognition and interpretation of human affective and social behaviour, models of “mentalising” and “empathising” for affective interaction in naturalistic settings, and techniques for synthesis of believable social behaviour supporting real-time adaptive human-agent and human-robot interaction in real-world environments.

This year AFFINE especially welcomes studies that provide new insights into the use of multimodal techniques for enabling interaction between humans and technology “in the wild”, i.e., in natural, everyday, non-laboratory settings. We anticipate the main outcome of this workshop to be the identification and investigation of important open issues in real-time, affect-aware applications in natural environments. Issues such as natural and multimodal interaction, estimation and adaption to context, context dependent processing and related databases, HCI/HRI beyond emotion (cognition, behaviour, etc.) and best practices for application to real environments will be discussed in the context of interacting with other humans and social artefacts.

Topics include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Multimodal human affect and social behaviour recognition
• Multimodal expression generation in robots and virtual agents
• Perception-action loops in agents/robots
• Cognitive and affective ‘mentalising’
• Visual attention / user engagement with robots and embodied conversational agents (ECAs)
• Emotion and cognitive state representation
• Social context awareness and adaptation
• Natural Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) / Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)
• Frameworks for adaptive, real-time HCI and HRI
• Multimodal and emotional corpora (naturally evoked or induced emotion)
• Techniques for handling noisy data in real world scenarios
• Affective mobile computing
• Recognition of human behaviour for implicit tagging
• Crowdsourcing affective behaviour
• Exertion games/physical interaction
• Real-world interactive/affective artefacts
• Applications to interactive games, robots and virtual agents

Program committee

Albert Ali Salah (Bogazici University, Turkey)
Nadia Bianchi-Berthouze (University College London, UK)
Timothy Bickmore (Norteastern University, USA)
Carlos Busso (The University of Texas at Dallas, USA)
Marc Cavazza (University of Teesside, UK)
Kerstin Dautenhahn (University of Hertfordshire, UK)
Laurence Devillers (LIMSI-CNRS, France)
Sidney D’Mello (University of Notre Dame, USA)
Faiyaz Doctor (Coventry University, UK)
Hatice Gunes (Queen Mary University of London, UK)
Zakia Hammal (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
Dirk Heylen (University of Twente, The Netherlands)
Stefanos Kollias (ICCS-NTUA, Greece)
Iolanda Leite (Instituto Superior Tecnico, Portugal)
Maurizio Mancini (University of Genova, Italy)
Peter William McOwan (Queen Mary University of London, UK)
Radoslaw Niewiadomski (Telecom ParisTech, France)
Fotios Papadopoulos (University of Birmingham, UK)
Bjoern Schuller (Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Germany)
Giovanna Varni (University of Genova, Italy)
Gualtiero Volpe (University of Genova, Italy)
Michael Walters (University of Hertfordshire, UK)

Important dates

Deadline for paper submission: 26 April 2013
Notification of acceptance: 3 June 2013
Camera ready paper: 17 June 2013

Paper format

Papers should be 6 pages long and follow the standard IEEE double column format, in accordance with the guidelines of the ACII conference. For more information about the format, see the workshop’s website: http://www.image.ntua.gr/affine/

Workshop chairs

Ginevra Castellano (University of Birmingham, UK)
Kostas Karpouzis (National Technical University of Athens, Greece)
Jean-Claude Martin (Paris South University, France)
Louis-Philippe Morency (University of Southern California, USA)
Christopher Peters (KTH, Sweden)
Laurel Riek (University of Notre Dame, USA)