***************************************************************************** CBAR 2012: CALL FOR PAPERS SocialCom12 1st International  Workshop on CONTEXT BASED AFFECT RECOGNITION http://contextbasedaffectrecog.blogspot.com/ Submission Deadline: May 11th, 2012 ***************************************************************************** The first workshop on "Context Based Affect Recognition" CBAR12 (http://contextbasedaffectrecog.blogspot.com/) wil be held in conjunction with the 2012 ASE/IEEE International Conference on Social Computing SocialCom2012 (http://www.asesite.org/conferences/socialcom/2012/). ----------------------------- Workshop Description ----------------------------- The past 20 years has witnessed an increasing number of efforts for automatic recognition of human affect using facial, vocal, body as well as physiological signals. Several research areas could benefit from such systems: interactive teaching systems, which allow teachers to be aware of student stress and inattention; accident prevention, such as driver fatigue detection; medical tools for automatic diagnosis and monitoring such as the diagnosis of cognitive disorder (e.g. depression, anxiety and autism) and pain assessment. However, despite the significant amount of research on automatic affect recognition, the current state of the art has not yet achieved the long-term objective of robust affect recognition, particularly context based affect analysis and interpretation. Indeed, it is well known that affect production is accordingly displayed in a particular context, such as the undergoing task, the other people involved, the identity and natural expressiveness of the individual. The context tells us which expressions are more likely to occur and thus can bias the classifier toward the most likely/relevant classes. Without context, even humans may misunderstand the observed facial expression. By tackling the issues of context based affect recognition, i.e. careful study of contextual information and its relevance in domain-specific applications, its representation, and its effect on the performance of existing affect recognition methods, we make a step towards real-world, real-time affect recognition. ----------------------------- Workshop Objectives ----------------------------- Context related affect analysis is still an unexplored area for automatic affect recognition given the difficulty of modeling this variable and of its introduction in the classification process. Unconsciously, humans evaluate situations based on environment and social parameters when recognizing emotions in social interactions. Contextual information helps us interpret and respond to social interactions.  The purpose of the workshop is to explore the benefits and drawbacks of integrating context on affect production, interpretation and recognition. We wish to investigate what methodologies can be applied to include contextual information in emotion corpora, how it ought to be represented, what contextual information are relevant (i.e. is it domain specific or not?), and how it will improve the performance of existing frameworks for affect recognition. The workshop is relevant in the study of naturalistic social interactions since contextual information cannot be discounted in doing automatic analysis of human behavior. Embedding contextual information, such as culture, provides a different flavor to each interaction, and makes for an interesting scientific study. Such kinds of analysis lead us to consider real-world parameters and complexities in affect recognition, especially in developing human-centric systems. For the workshop weinvite scientists working in related areas of affective computing, ambient computing, machine learning, psychology and cognitive behavior to share their expertise and achievements in the emerging field of automatic and context based affect analysis and recognition.  ----------------------------- Workshop Topics ----------------------------- New and unpublished papers on, but not limited to, the following topics: ·     Context source detection. ·      Context interpretation and analysis. ·      Context based affect production ·      Context based facial affect recognition ·      Context based vocal affect recognition ·      Context based gesture affect recognition ·      Context based multimodal fusion. ·      Applications (Context related affect applications). For details concerning the workshop program, paper submission guidelines, etc. please visit our workshop website at: http://contextbasedaffectrecog.blogspot.com/   Best regards, Zakia Hammal Zakia Hammal, PhD The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University http://www.ri.cmu.edu/ Human-Machine Interaction Facial Expression Recognition Visual Perception http://www.pitt.edu/~emotion/ZakiaHammal.html