WMSSP 2010 - First International Workshop on Mobile Social Signal Processing (WMSSP)

Given their status as a preeminent form of social interaction, mobile phone conversations have been the subject of relatively limited investigation, in terms of social behavior. This leaves open a major gap when two important developments take place. On one hand, Mobile HCI often deals with advanced mobile phones containing a large number of sensors (e.g., GPS, accelerometers, magnetometers, capacitive touch) and with sufficient processing power to capture with unprecedented richness behavior and context of users (e.g., position, movement, hand grip, proximity of social network members, gait type, auditory context). On the other hand, the computing community, in particular Social Signal Processing (SSP), makes significant efforts towards automatic understanding (via analysis of verbal and nonverbal behavior) of social interactions captured with multiple sensors.

This workshop bridges the abovementioned gap by gathering SSP and Mobile HCI researchers. Cross-pollination is expected to extend the investigation area of the two domains and highlight a number of research questions that not only promise to bring significant novelty in both SSP and Mobile HCI, but also require the application of knowledge from both domains to be effectively investigated:

Is it possible to integrate the input of mobile phone sensors in current approaches for automatic analysis of social phenomena in conversations?
Does context influence the communication behavior of people talking on the phone?
Does the transmission of nonverbal behavioral cues, so important in face-to-face communication, improve phone conversation experience?
Does a better understanding of communication behavior influence the design of mobile phones?
Can we evaluate how use of a mobile phone affects the key social interaction variables of ‘trust’ and ‘competence’ evaluation?.
Can we create metrics which help us evaluate the effect on social interaction of augmenting the voice channel with other feedback channels?
Can we create non-vocal, but embodied interaction techniques which are appropriate for mobile use?
What would be the ethical issues related to the everyday use of in-hand, automated social signal analysis?
Topics
Workshop topics include (but are not limited to):

Conversational behavior analysis
Social Location and Context ? measurement, analysis and use
Social Signal Processing in design of mobile interactions
Social Signal Processing in mobile entertainment and wellbeing
Databases and Social Signal Processing based content retrieval
Cognitive modeling, automatic understanding, and synthesis of social phenomena
Important Dates
Full paper submission: May 30th, 2010
Notification of Acceptance: June 20th, 2010
Camera ready paper submission: June 30th, 2010
Workshop: September 7th, 2010