WASA 2015 - 1st International Workshop on Automatic Sentiment Analysis in the Wild (WASA’15)

The Workshop on Automatic Sentiment Analysis (WASA) workshop series is the premier international forum for research on technologies for analysis of human sentiment, and empathic and social behaviour observed in the wild. Machine analysis of human sentiment in response to multimedia content (movie trailers, product adverts, etc.) by people in the wild, and automatic estimation of sentiment, rapport and empathy shown by people involved in unscripted face-to-face or computer-mediated interaction, is of utmost importance for research on next-generation computing and multimedia including affective multimodal interfaces, interactive multi-party games, user-centric healthcare and online services, automatic market research analysis, etc. This research topic ? arguably being the most intriguing and researched topic within the fields of Affective Computing and Social Signal Processing ? has witnessed a surge of interest in the past couple of years and is progressing rapidly with new or pending applications in intelligent HCI, psychology, politics, and entertainment technology, among other domains. With these advances come new conceptual and methodological challenges. The workshop will present cutting-edge research and new challenges in automatic analysis of human sentiment and empathy and its applications in an interdisciplinary forum of computer and behavioral scientists. It is aimed towards bringing together scientists from a wide range of theoretical and application areas whose work impacts machine analysis of sentiment, empathy, and social interactions. The goal is to facilitate a truly interdisciplinary, fruitful discussion on machine analysis of human sentiment, empathic and social behavior between experts, new investigators, and students from all relevant fields.
Submissions will be rigorously reviewed, and should clearly make the case for a documented improvement over the existing state of the art. WASA 2015 will include an award for the best paper. In addition, the best WASA 2015 papers will be invited for a journal special issue. The workshop will be held in conjunction with ACII 2015. The program will include keynotes and a panel discussion.
The general workshop topics will include, but are not limited to:
Social Intelligence and Sentiment Modeling
Sentiment, empathy and social behavior analysis from facial, vocal and bodily expressions recorded in the wild
Expressive speech analysis in social interactions observed in the wild
Human gesture and action recognition in social interactions observed in the wild
Perceptual, empathic, and socially-aware user interfaces
Empathic multimedia recommendation systems
Databases for training and testing
Empathic and socially-aware computing and applications
Paper Awards and Journal Special Issue:
WASA 2015 will include an award for the best paper. In addition, the best WASA 2015 papers will be invited for a special issue of the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing.
Conference/ Program Chairs:
Maja Pantic (Imperial College London, UK), email: m.pantic-AT-imperial.ac.uk
Bjoern Schuller (University of Passau, DE), email: bjoern.schuller-AT-gmail.com
Elnar Hajiyev (RealEyes, EE/UK), email: elnar-AT-realeyesit.com
Florian Eyben (audEERING UG, DE), email: fe-AT-audeering.com