Call for Papers

Special Issue of the
ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems
on AFFECTIVE INTERACTION IN NATURAL ENVIRONMENTS

Main submission deadline: December 6th, 2010

http://tiis.acm.org/special-issues.html

AIMS AND SCOPE

A vital requirement for social robots, virtual agents, and
human-centered multimodal 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, gesture, or
generation of speech.

This special issue will cover computational techniques for the
recognition and interpretation of human multimodal verbal and
nonverbal behavior, models of mentalizing and empathizing for
interaction, and multimedia techniques for the synthesis of
believable social behavior supporting human-agent and human-robot
interaction.

A key aim of the special issue 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. We encourage the submission of 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.

The special issue especially welcomes submission of
contributions that focus on innovative intelligent technology and
the way it is successfully integrated into the interaction cycle
between users and virtual agents and robots, in line with the
binocular view encouraged by TiiS.

Submissions can come from a variety of research areas,
including naturalistic human-robot and human-computer interaction
and multimedia human-computer interaction. The categories below
cover most of the relevant topics, but they are not exhaustive.
In case of doubt about the relevance of your topic, please
contact the guest editors.

TOPICS

Focus on Recognition:

Multimodal human affect and social behavior recognition,
including:
 - Facial expressions
 - Body language
 - Speech
 - Physiological signals
 - Other modalities
 - Cognitive and affective "mentalizing"
 - Recognition of human behavior for implicit tagging

Focus on Generation:

Multimedia expression generation in robots and virtual agents,
including:
 - Gaze
 - Gestures
 - Facial expressions
 - Speech
 - Other modalities

Focus on Interaction:

- Emotion and cognitive state representation
- Perception-action loops in agents/robots
- Visual attention / user engagement with robots and embodied
 conversational agents
- Social context-awareness and adaptation
- Applications of methods and results in the above areas to
 interactive games, robots, and virtual agents

Databases:

- Multimodal corpora for training recognition systems
- Multimodal corpora for modeling the behavior of agents and
 robots

GUEST EDITORS

- Ginevra Castellano, Queen Mary University of London, UK
 (contact: ginevra[at]dcs[dot]qmul[dot]ac[dot]uk)
- Kostas Karpouzis, National Technical University of Athens,
 Greece
- Jean-Claude Martin, LIMSI-CNRS, France
- Louis-Philippe Morency, University of Southern California, USA
- Christopher Peters, Coventry University, UK
- Laurel Riek, University of Cambridge, UK

IMPORTANT DATES

- December 6th, 2010: Submission of manuscripts
- By March 18th, 2011: Notification about decisions on initial
 submissions
- By June 17th, 2011: Submission of revised manuscripts
- By September 2nd, 2011: Notification about decisions on revised
 manuscripts
- By September 23rd, 2011: Submission of manuscripts with final
 minor changes
- October, 2011: Publication of the special issue on the TiiS
 website, in the ACM Digital Library, and (shortly afterward) as a
 printed issue

HOW TO SUBMIT

Manuscripts will be submitted via the ScholarOne Manuscripts site
of the ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems
(TiiS). All necessary information will be found in the
instructions for authors at tiis.acm.org.

ABOUT ACM TiiS

TiiS (pronounced "T double-eye S") is a new ACM journal for
research concerning interactive systems that make use of some
form of machine intelligence. TiiS's editorial workflow and
infrastructure include innovations designed to ensure journal
quality at conference speed.  For detailed information, see
tiis.acm.org.