ASSP4MI 2015 - 2015 International Workshop on Advancements in Social Signal Processing for Multimodal Interaction

The last decade has shown a significant increase in research in affective computing and social signal processing (SSP). This body of work is inherently multimodal (e.g. eye gaze, vocal and facial expressions) and multidisciplinary (e.g. psychology, linguistics, computer science) of nature by addressing foci that call for these approaches. Major foci are the understanding and automatic detection and interpretation of emotional and social behavior in spontaneous interactions, as well as the generation of socially normative behavior in specific situations. The interpretation of multimodal behaviors also makes it possible to endow systems, such as virtual agents or robots, with socially intelligent capabilities.
The developments in the field are remarkable, especially with respect to methods and applications, which are tightly intertwined. These developments have also led to the emergence of related (sub)fields such as computational social science where data-driven modeling of massive amounts of behavioral data of groups of people for the understanding of social phenomena is key. SSP seems to be continuously developing as a lively multidisciplinary research domain, bringing along new challenges, methods, application areas and emerging fields of research.
After a decade of the introduction of SSP as a research field, we believe it is time to take stock and look into the future. The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers to discuss recent as well as future developments in SSP for multimodal interaction research: where do we stand now, what are the recent developments in novel methods and application areas, what are the major challenges, and how do we further mature and broaden and increase the impact of SSP? We also believe it is necessary to ensure the quality and advancement of the research in SSP and by training students with the necessary expertise. Since SSP is a relatively new research domain, a textbook for teaching SSP is not available (yet). How we may teach SSP is therefore another topic of interest in this workshop.
Topics
We invite both research and position papers and aim for a mix of presentations around recent research and around presentations/discussions about the future of SSP. Papers related to the following topics are in particular encouraged, although other topics are also welcome:
Recent research
?Detection and interpretation of social behaviors in human-human and human-agent interaction
?Generation of social agent (virtual and robot) behavior
?Databases and methods for data collection and annotation for SSP research
?Analysis of social group behaviors
Methodology
?Standardization: what are standard practices in SSP research?
?Cross-disciplinary methods: what methods can be borrowed from other disciplines?
?What are novel methods used in SSP: e.g., virtual research environments (VRE), virtual reality, novel data collection methods, crowdsourcing, methods dealing with multimodal information, human-in-the-loop machine learning?
Application Areas
?What are the novel application areas, e.g., human-robot interaction, health, clinical and therapeutic settings, smart environments, multimedia retrieval, what can they offer SSP and vice versa?
?What could be the killer applications of SSP?
?How is SSP used in other disciplines, such as psychology?
Education
?What are the fundamentals in SSP to be taught to students, what would a course in SSP look like?
?What capabilities should a student being trained in SSP have?