ERM4CT 2016 - 2nd workshop on Emotion Representations and Modelling for Companion Systems (ERM4CT 2016)

The major goal in human computer interaction (HCI) research and applications is to improve the interaction between humans and computers. As interaction is often very specific for an individual and generally of multi-modal nature, the current trend of multi-modal user-adaptable HCI systems arose over the past years. These systems are designed as companions capable of assisting their users based on the users’ needs, preferences, personality and affective state. Companion systems are dependent on reliable emotion recognition methods in order to provide natural, user-centred interactions.
In order to study natural, user-centred interactions, to develop user-centred emotion representations and to model adequate affective system behaviour, appropriate multi-modal data comprising not just audio and video material must be available. Following its ancestor, the ERM4HCI workshop series, the ERM4CT workshop focuses on emotion representations, signal characteristics used to describe and identify emotions as well as their influence on personality and user state models to be incorporated in companion systems. As a further highlight, this year's workshop offers a “hands-on” session, where a dataset comprised of 10 different modalities will be made available prior to the workshop to the participants. The participants are encouraged to analyse the dataset in terms of emotion recognition, interaction studies, conversational analyses, etc.