WEC 2011 - 2nd International Workshop on Empathic Computing

Technology has matured sufficiently to tackle problems providing emotional and social intelligence to computing systems. Right now, there is a need for human-centered systems, i.e. systems that are seamlessly integrated into everyday life, easy to use, multimodal, and anticipatory. These systems widen the breadth of users of computing systems, from the very young to the elderly, as well as to the physically-challenged. Empathic systems are human-centered systems.

Empathic computing systems are software or physical context-aware computing systems capable of building user models and provide richer, naturalistic, system-initiated empathic responses with the objective of providing intelligent assistance and support. We view empathy as a cognitive act that involves the perception of the user's thought, affect (i.e., emotional feeling or mood), intention or goal, activity, and/or situation and a response due to this perception that is supportive of the user. An empathic computing system is ambient intelligent, i.e., it consists of seamlessly integrated ubiquitous networked sensors, microprocessors and software for it to perceive the various user behavioral patterns from multimodal inputs.

Empathic computing systems may be applied to various areas such as e-health, geriatric domestic support, empathic home/space, productivity systems, entertainment and e-learning. Lastly, this approach shall draw upon the expertise in, and theories of, ubiquitous sensor-rich computing, embedded systems, affective computing, user adaptive interfaces, image processing, digital signal processing and machine learning in artificial intelligence.

The Workshop will be held in conjunction with the 3rd International Conference on Knowledge and Systems Engineering (KSE 2011) to be held on October 14-17, 2011 in Hanoi, Vietnam.

On its second year, IWEC focuses on the ambient intelligent, socio-affective context of empathic computing. Empathic systems are relevant essentially because of their capability to infer not only user behavioral states, but also about the context in which the user is involved. Appropriate responses are heavily influenced by the context of its occurrence.

To be a gathering of researchers working on embedded systems and sensor networks, digital signal processing, affective computing and adaptive user interfaces as applied to the problem of developing empathic computing systems;
To be a venue to disseminate forefront research results on the area of empathic computing; and
To generate further interest in the area and its real-world novel application areas.
We are inviting new and unpublished papers on, but not limited to, the following topics:
Emotion and mood recognition
Intention Recognition
Behavior/Activity Recognition
Motion/Gesture Detection
Multimodal Communication
Sensor Networks for Human Tracking
Social Signal Processing
Wearable or Implantable Sensor Integration
Sensor Networks for Intelligent Interfaces
Data fusion in Intelligent Ambient Spaces
Multimodal Approaches for Improved Decision-making
Motivational Aids in Intelligent Education Systems
Advanced Home Automation Systems
e-Health and Geriatrics Care
Social Agents