Emotion Area @ ACM MM 2014

Emotional and Social Signals in Multimedia Area at ACM Multimedia 2014

A lot of multimedia systems capture human behavior, and in particular, social and emotional signals. These systems would therefore benefit from the ability to automatically interpret and react to the social and emotional context. The interpretation, analysis, and synthesis of social and emotional signals requires a different expertise that draws from a combination of signal processing, machine learning, pattern recognition, and behavioral and social psychology. Analyzing multimedia content, where humans spontaneously express and respond to social or affect signals, helps to attribute meaning to users’ attitudes, preferences, relationships, feelings, personality, etc., as well as to understand the social and affective context of activities occurring in people’s everyday life.

This area focuses on the analysis of emotional and interactive social behavior in the spectrum of individual to small group settings. It calls for novel contributions with a strong human-centered focus specializing in supporting or developing automated techniques for analyzing, processing, interpreting, synthesizing, or exploiting human social and affective signals for multimedia applications. Special emphasis is put on multimodal approaches leveraging multiple streams when analyzing the verbal and/or non-verbal social and emotional signals during interactions. These interactions could be remote or co-located, and can include e.g. interactions between multiple people, humans with computer systems/robots, or humans with conversational agents.