Call for Papers: Advances in Affective Computing

A special issue of International Journal of Computational Intelligence Studies

Human emotions are considered very important in human-human interaction, but have only recently started being taken into account in human-computer interaction (HCI). The fact is that emotions affect human thought and behaviour to a large extent; thus, the whole issue of human-computer interaction has to take into account the emotional state of its users.

 Unfortunately, expression of emotion is very idiosyncratic and varies from individual to individual. However, since researchers in the last decade have discovered dozens of scientific findings that illuminate important roles of emotion in intelligent human functioning, human affect has started to be incorporated into novel, sophisticated HCI systems.

 While trying to recognise emotional states, we may have to combine information from multiple channels or modalities of interaction. Indeed, human emotions are usually expressed in many ways. As an example, when we articulate speech, we usually move the head and simultaneously form various facial emotions. This is further corroborated by recent research in the fields of psychology and neurology which indicates that both body and mind are involved in emotional experiences, and that emotions influence people’s bodily movements.

 This gives rise to a need for successfully combining evidence from many modes of interaction for computer systems to be able to generate as valid hypotheses as possible about their users’ emotions. To achieve this, there are a great deal of very challenging problems yet to be solved.

 The aim of this special issue is to shed light on these needs, and to broaden our understanding of past and potential approaches to affective computing and technologies to address them. Thus, potential authors are invited to submit contributions related to the field of affective computing.

 Submissions may be of a theoretical nature (e.g. relevant empirical studies), may present affective computing systems developed by the authors, or may comparatively evaluate alternative methodologies/algorithms for processing and combining affective computing data.

Suitable topics include but are not limited to:

• Recognition and synthesis of human affect
• Analysis of human behaviour
• Relevant insights from psychology
• Empirical studies in human affect recognition
• Face recognition
• Speech recognition
• Facial expression and emotion categorisation
• Speech emotion categorisation
• Gesture analysis and recognition
• Gesture emotion categorisation
• Keyboard stroke pattern categorisation
• Affective databases, evaluation and annotation tools
• Affective visual recognition
• Affective voice recognition
• Affective linguistic recognition
• Affective paralinguistic recognition
• Affective multimodal recognition
• Affective multimodal interfaces
• Affective agents
• Affect-sensitive applications
• Applications

Important Dates
Paper submission: 30 April, 2012
Review results/Author notification: 15 June, 2012
Final paper submission: 15 July, 2012