CALL FOR PAPERS AAAI Workshop on Perceiving and Interpreting Action http://www.media.mit.edu/pia97/ At the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, July 27-31 1997, Providence, Rhode Island, USA Recent advances in technology and economy of computer vision have created wide interest in interpreting action, particularly that of people. Anticipating a day when real-time vision becomes a significant medium for human-computer interaction, many researchers have proposed inference-rich applications: Virtual assistants that help mechanics do repairs; digital coaches for dancers and athletes; vision-driven VR applications; safety monitors that look for trouble in baby-rooms, factory floors, and traffic. Some parts of these applications have already been prototyped. However, connecting perception to inference and determining what inferences should happen remain looming problems. Efforts toward action-understanding may require or spur advances in non-rigid motion tracking, event perception, visual learning, probabilistic inference, causal and temporal reasoning, plan recognition, and models of intentionality. The workshop is aimed at bringing together researchers in perception, AI, learning, and psychology whose work connects with the perception and interpretation of action. We expect to see papers on topics such as: Visual representations for motion interpretation. Motion pattern classification for articulating bodies. The spatiotemporal structure of actions. Interpreting gestures in context. Inferring context (tasks and activities) from video/audio/proprioception. Temporal inference over approximate and noisy data. Learning and recognizing procedures from video. High-level models of action and intention. Inferring plans and goals from sensing via high-level models. Systems capable of sustained human-computer cooperation. Other perceptual modalities. The 1-day workshop will consist of four topical sessions of research presentations, each led by an invited talk or tutorial and capped with a short panel discussion. Attendance will be limited to 30 people to encourage group discussion. In addition to working notes, we expect to produce a digital proceedings which can be browsed over the web after the workshop. Submissions Interested researchers are invited to submit short but complete technical papers (up to 8 pages, 4000 words) or statements of interest describing relevant research. We are interested in both mature research and early results from works-in-progress. Electronic submissions are strongly encouraged: ascii, postscript, or html (self-contained directories packaged via tar, Stuffit, or pkzip) should be deposited via anonymous ftp in ftp://pia97.media.mit.edu/incoming and an email message should be sent to pia97@media.mit.edu containing your name, title, abstract, ftp file name, and mail/email/WWW addresses. WWW pages with step-by-step instructions and a submission form can be found at http://www.media.mit.edu/pia97/ Hardcopy should be sent to PIA97 c/o Matthew Brand MIT Media Lab E15-385 20 Ames Street Cambridge, MA 02139-4307 email: pia97@media.mit.edu phone: 617.253.0608 fax: 617.253.8874 Key Dates 11mar97 Submissions deadline 1apr97 Notifications 22apr97 Camera-ready copy deadline 27/28jul97 Workshop In the event that many intriguing papers are received, the workshop may be expanded to two days. Organizing Committee Aaron Bobick, Matthew Brand (chair), Sandy Pentland, MIT Media Lab, {bobick,brand,sandy}@media.mit.edu; Stan Rosenschein, Stanford/Autodesk, stan.rosenschein@autodesk.com; Michael Swain, University of Chicago, swain@cs.uchicago.edu