• 12/10/09: Workshop programme available
• 07/10/09: List of accepted papers added to site
• 04/09/09: Camera Ready Version date changed to 04/10
• 10/07/09: Added submission format details
• 04/05/09: Updated submission details
• 30/04/09: New website

The AFFINE Workshop programme is now available for download. Please click the following link to access the programme.

Access Programme

A vital requirement for social robots and virtual agents is the ability to infer the affective and mental states of humans, so as to be able to engage in and behave appropriately during social interactions, for example, to ensure the user is interested in maintaining the interaction or to provide suitable empathic responses. One major component in such a mentalizing capacity, comprised of both cognitive and affective strands, is the interpretation of human behaviour from sensory input, which must always be conducted in a timely manner. Researchers in multimodal interfaces have been increasingly addressing the design of systems endowed with this ability. Nevertheless, only a few attempts have been made towards the development of virtual agents and robots capable of inferring the user.s states in real-time and engaging in meaningful interaction (e.g. towards a shared goal). This workshop will consider real-time techniques for the recognition and interpretation of human verbal and non-verbal behaviour for application in human-agent and human-robot interaction frameworks.

This workshop follows the successful ICMI.2008 AFFINE workshop (AFFINE - Affective Interaction in Natural Environments: Real-time affect analysis and interpretation for virtual agents and robots). An outcome of this past workshop is a special issue of the Springer Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces (JMUI) to appear in December 2009 (submission deadline April 2009).

This new 2009 workshop seeks to bring together those who work on the real-time interpretation of user behavior to produce mid- or high-level state descriptors, from basic emotions to more complex appraisals or mental states (e.g. agreement and interest, or blends of several emotions) with those who wish to apply this capacity as part of a 'social perception' module or equivalent in social robots and virtual agent interaction frameworks.

We expect the main outcome of this workshop to be the identification of open issues in real-time, affect-aware applications .in the wild. and especially in embodied interaction (robots). Issues such as natural and multimodal interaction, estimation and adaption to context, context dependent processing and related databases, HCI beyond emotion (cognition, behavior, etc.) will be discussed in the framework of interacting with other humans, embodied conversational agents and social robots.

In addition to that, researchers from diverse fields (signal processing and pattern recognition, machine learning, cognition, HCI and robotics) will benefit from mutual osmosis of ideas, concepts and developments in the field.

A possible outcome of the workshop is a journal special issue to appear in 2010 (possibly by the Springer Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces www.jmui.org).