AFFINE 2010: 3rd International Workshop on
         Affective Interaction in Natural Environments
                   at ACM Multimedia 2010
            Friday 29th October 2010, Florence, Italy
       http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/conference/affine2010  

UPDATE: follow-up special issue, ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (TiiS)

Background
-------------

A vital requirement for social robots, virtual agents, and human-centered multimedia interfaces is the ability to infer the affective and mental states of humans and provide appropriate, timely output during sustained social interactions. 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 multimodal verbal and non-verbal behaviour, models of mentalising and empathising for interaction, and multimedia techniques for synthesis of believable social behaviour supporting human-agent and human-robot interaction.


A key aim of the workshop is the identification and investigation of important open issues in real-time, affect-aware applications 'in the wild' and especially in embodied interaction, i.e. with robots and embodied conversational agents. 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 applications in real environments will be discussed in the context of interacting with other humans and social artefacts.


We welcome the participation of researchers from diverse fields, including signal processing and pattern recognition, machine learning, cognition, affective science, human-computer interaction, human-robot interaction, and robotics. We hope an interdisciplinary group will benefit from mutual osmosis of ideas, concepts and developments in the field.

The workshop especially welcomes studies that provide new insights into the use of multimodal and multimedia techniques for enabling interaction between humans, robots, and virtual agents in naturalistic settings. We also encourage the submission of work-in-progress papers including recent results providing novel and exciting contributions.


Accepted papers will be published in the ACM Digital Library.


As a follow-up to the workshop, there will be a special issue on Affective Interaction in Natural Environments in the ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (TiiS, http://tiis.acm.org). Participation in the AFFINE 2010 workshop should help interested authors to prepare strong journal-length submissions to this special issue; but the special issue will be open to all researchers worldwide who have done relevant work.


Topics
--------

Workshop topics may include, but are not limited to:
   - Multimedia expression generation in robots and virtual agents, including:
       * Gaze
       * Gestures
       * Facial Expressions
       * Speech
       * Other modalities
   - Multimodal human affect and social behaviour recognition, including:
     * Facial expressions
       * Body language
       * Speech
       * Physiological
       * Other modalities
    - 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)
    - Multimedia HCI
    - Multimodal and emotional corpora (naturally evoked or induced emotion)
    - Recognition of human behaviour for implicit tagging
    - Contributions to standards for multimodal interaction and specification of mark-up languages
    - Applications to interactive games, robots and virtual agents

About AFFINE ----------------- This workshop follows the previous successful AFFINE workshops organised as satellite events of ICMI '08 (http://www.telecom.tuc.gr/~potam/icmi2008/) and ICMI-MLMI '09 (http://icmi2009.acm.org/), as well as a special session organised at WIAMIS '09 (http://wiamis2009.qmul.net/). This is the first time the workshop has been held at ACM Multimedia. AFFINE has a track record for attracting researchers from the virtual agents, social robotics and affective computing communities and encourages interdisciplinarity - submissions from other domains are also very welcome.

Important Dates
-------------------

   - Deadline for paper submission: 10 June 2010
   - Notification of acceptance: 30 June 2010
   - Camera ready paper: 15 July 2010

Submission Instructions
---------------------------------

Please prepare your paper in accordance with the ACM Multimedia Guidelines. Your paper may be either 4 or 6 pages in length, including references and figures.


Authors may submit a pdf version of their paper using the ACM Multimedia 2010 paper submission system. Please note: The review process is double-blind, so please be sure to remove any identifying information before uploading your submission (name, affiliation, tell-tale references, etc).


Contact

-----------


If you have any questions, please write to the organisers: affine2010 at googlemail dot com

Programme
----------------

There will be a keynote talk by Prof. Antonio Camurri, University of Genoa.


Organising committee

------------------------------------


General Chairs:


  * Ginevra Castellano, Queen Mary University London, UK
  * Kostas Karpouzis, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
  * Laurel Riek, University of Cambridge, UK


Program Chairs:


  * Jean-Claude Martin, LIMSI-CNRS, France
  * Louis-Philippe Morency, University of Southern California, USA
  * Christopher Peters, Coventry University, UK


Program Committee (alphabetical)

------------------------------------------------


  * Aris Alissandrakis (ATR, Japan)
  * Elisabeth André (Augsburg Universtiy, Germany)
  * Tony Belpaeme (University of Plymouth, UK)
  * Elisabetta Bevacqua (CNRS/TELECOM ParisTech, France)
  * Timothy Bickmore (Northeastern University, USA)
  * Nadia Bianchi-Berthouze (University College London, UK)
  * Carlos Busso (The University of Texas at Dallas, USA)
  * Lola Cañamero (University of Hertfordshire, UK)
  * Marc Cavazza (University of Teesside, UK)
  * Kerstin Dautenhahn (University of Hertfordshire, UK)
  * Vanessa Evers (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)
  * Hatice Gunes (Imperial College, UK)
  * Dirk Heylen (University of Twente, Netherlands)
  * Stefanos Kollias (National Technical University of Athens, Greece)
  * Maurizio Mancini (University of Genova, Italy)
  * Carlos Martinho (Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal)
  * Peter William McOwan (Queen Mary University of London, UK)
  * Yukiko Nakano (Seikei University, Japan)
  * Anton Nijholt (University of Twente, Netherlands)
  * Maja Pantic (Imperial College London, UK / University of Twente, Netherlands)
  * Catherine Pelachaud (CNRS/TELECOM ParisTech, France)
  * Peter Robinson (University of Cambridge, UK)
  * Candace Sidner (Worcester Polytechnic Institute, USA)
  * Marc Schroeder (DFKI, Germany)
  * Bjoern Schuller (Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Germany)
  * Gualtiero Volpe (University of Genova, Italy)
  * Astrid Weiss (University of Salzburg, Austria)
  * Yorick Wilks (University of Oxford, UK)
  * Georgios Yannakakis (IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
  * Massimo Zancanaro (FBK, Italy)