AAAI Symposium on Turn-taking and Coordination in Human-Machine Interaction
March 23-25th, 2015
Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA

The AAAI Symposium on Turn-taking and Coordination in Human-Machine Interaction will bring together researchers across multiple disciplines–including multimodal systems, human-robot interaction, embodied conversational agents, and spoken dialogue systems–to address a topic of common interest: the modeling, realization, and evaluation of turn-taking and real-time action coordination between humans and artificial interactive systems. This symposium will serve to build common ground for researchers from these disparate backgrounds to share their perspectives, methodologies, and results from their own investigations into the problem of multimodal coordination.

Regulating human-computer coordination hinges critically on multimodal sensing, making decisions under uncertainty and time constraints, and on synchronizing behaviors across different output modalities. On the sensing side, there are numerous challenges with tracking the conversational dynamics from multimodal data. Making coordination decisions often requires reasoning under uncertainty and strict time constraints. Designing and rendering appropriate coordination behaviors (e.g., floor-taking actions, floor-releasing actions, and back-channels) appropriate for the affordances of a system’s embodiment raises additional challenges.

Topics include, but are not limited to:

• models for coordinating linguistic and non-linguistic actions
• computational models for multi-party coordination and turn-taking
• multimodal inference for turn-taking (inferences about user utterances, transition relevant places, floor control actions, backchannels, etc.)
• incremental speech and audio-visual processing
• high-frequency, real-time decision making under uncertainty
• fusion of multiple information sources for making coordination decisions
• machine learning for multimodal inference and making coordination decisions
• communication dynamics in human-human action coordination and turn-taking
• listener feedback behavior, including back-channel generation
• turn-taking phenomena and affordances (e.g. linguistic and non-linguistic actions such as disfluencies, filled pauses, hedging, floor-holding, gestures and gaze, etc)
• generation of coordination and turn-taking behaviours (behavioural rendering)
• issues in coordination among parties with asymmetric roles, goals, or affordances
• effects of social factors and relationships on coordination behaviour
• cross-linguistic and cross-cultural factors
• corpora and resources for action coordination and turn-taking research
• metrics and methodologies for assessing coordination competencies
• empirical evaluation of action coordination and turn-taking models
• comparisons across human-robot interaction, embodied conversational agents, and spoken dialogue systems

Submission:

Prospective authors are invited to submit full technical papers (up to 8 pages) and short position papers (up to 4 pages). Accepted papers will be published in a technical report on the AAAI Digital Library.

In addition, we invite submission of videos (up to 5 minutes with a 1 page accompanying description) that illustrate both successful coordination in human-machine interactions as well as failure cases, as we believe these are as important (if not more) in driving research and the field forward. The accepted videos will be presented during a video session, and will serve as drivers for an open, plenary discussion on research challenges and opportunities in this area. The video descriptions will be archived in the AAAI Digital Library, and the accepted videos will be stored on the symposium website.

For further information, see http://hci.cs.wisc.edu/workshops/AAAI/SSS2015

Important Dates:

Submission Deadline:
October 20, 2014

Notification of Acceptance:
November 10, 2014

Camera-Ready Deadline:
January 19, 2015

Symposium Date:
March 23-25, 2015

Organizers:

• Sean Andrist (sandrist@cs.wisc.edu), University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
• Dan Bohus (dbohus@microsoft.com), Microsoft Research, USA
• Eric Horvitz (horvitz@microsoft.com), Microsoft Research, USA
• Bilge Mutlu (bilge@cs.wisc.edu), University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
• David Schlangen (david.schlangen@uni-bielefeld.de), Bielefeld University, Germany