MMI 2017 - SPECIAL SESSION ON MULTIMEDIA AND MULTIMODAL INTERACTION FOR HEALTH AND BASIC CARE APPLICATIONS

This special session aims at presenting the most recent works and applications in the area of multimedia analysis and multimodal interaction in the context of health and basic care. As devices and systems are becoming increasingly powerful and in parallel the content analytics and retrieval technologies are boosting, the interface between human and computer is often lagging behind and constitutes a bottleneck for efficient use for real world applications. This is especially important in health and basic care applications, in which the interaction with humans is even more critical due to the special needs and urgent situations involved. Leveraging on multidisciplinary expertise combining knowledge from research in multimedia analysis, as well as the multimodal interaction domains, new technologies are required to offer interactions, which are closer to the communication patterns of human beings and allow for a more “natural” communication with systems in the context of health and basic care. This is currently envisioned by recent research, which aims at developing knowledge-based autonomous human-like social agents that can analyze, retrieve information and learn from conversational spoken and multimodal interaction in order to support care giving scenarios. In parallel, over the last few years we could observe an increasing need of video content processing for health applications. A very characteristic example is the videos from endoscopic procedures and surgeries, since endoscopists and surgeons are switching over to archive the videos they actually used to perform the endoscopic intervention. These endoscopic videos contain valuable information that can be used for later inspection, for explanations to patients, for case investigations, and for training purposes. Therefore there is an important need for the development of powerful multimedia systems that can effectively process huge amounts of video data with highly similar content and make them available for content exploration and retrieval.
The research topics of the special session include but are not limited to:
Multimedia analysis and retrieval for multimodal interaction in the health domain
Multimedia indexing and retrieval with video recordings from medical endoscopy
Multimodal conversation and dialogue systems for social companion agents
Exploration and retrieval in endoscopic video
Speech and audio analysis and retrieval for health applications
Facial analysis and gesture recognition in social agents
Fusion of multimedia information for health and care-giving applications
Semantic web approaches for multimedia health applications
Multimodal analytics for human machine interaction in the health domain
Web and social media retrieval for knowledge-based social companion applications
Organizers
Stefanos Vrochidis (Centre for Research and Technology Hellas, Information Technologies Institute)
Leo Wanner (ICREA ? Universitat Pompeu Fabra)
Elisabeth André (University of Augsburg)
Klaus Schoeffmann (Klagenfurt University)