Special Issue of the ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems on AFFECTIVE INTERACTION IN NATURAL ENVIRONMENTS Main submission deadline: December 6th, 2010 http://tiis.acm.org/special-issues.html AIMS AND SCOPE A vital requirement for social robots, virtual agents, and human-centered multimodal interfaces is the ability to infer the affective and mental states of humans and provide appropriate, timely output during sustained social interactions. Examples include ensuring that the user is interested in maintaining the interaction or providing suitable empathic responses through the display of facial expressions, gesture, or generation of speech. This special issue will cover computational techniques for the recognition and interpretation of human multimodal verbal and nonverbal behavior, models of mentalizing and empathizing for interaction, and multimedia techniques for the synthesis of believable social behavior supporting human-agent and human-robot interaction. A key aim of the special issue is the identification and investigation of important open issues in real-time, affect-aware applications "in the wild" and especially in embodied interaction, i.e., with robots and embodied conversational agents. We encourage the submission of studies that provide new insights into the use of multimodal and multimedia techniques for enabling interaction between humans, robots, and virtual agents in naturalistic settings. The special issue especially welcomes submission of contributions that focus on innovative intelligent technology and the way it is successfully integrated into the interaction cycle between users and virtual agents and robots, in line with the binocular view encouraged by TiiS. Submissions can come from a variety of research areas, including naturalistic human-robot and human-computer interaction and multimedia human-computer interaction. The categories below cover most of the relevant topics, but they are not exhaustive. In case of doubt about the relevance of your topic, please contact the guest editors. TOPICS Focus on Recognition: Multimodal human affect and social behavior recognition, including: - Facial expressions - Body language - Speech - Physiological signals - Other modalities - Cognitive and affective "mentalizing" - Recognition of human behavior for implicit tagging Focus on Generation: Multimedia expression generation in robots and virtual agents, including: - Gaze - Gestures - Facial expressions - Speech - Other modalities Focus on Interaction: - Emotion and cognitive state representation - Perception-action loops in agents/robots - Visual attention / user engagement with robots and embodied conversational agents - Social context-awareness and adaptation - Applications of methods and results in the above areas to interactive games, robots, and virtual agents Databases: - Multimodal corpora for training recognition systems - Multimodal corpora for modeling the behavior of agents and robots GUEST EDITORS - Ginevra Castellano, Queen Mary University of London, UK (contact: ginevra[at]dcs[dot]qmul[dot]ac[dot]uk) - Kostas Karpouzis, National Technical University of Athens, Greece - Jean-Claude Martin, LIMSI-CNRS, France - Louis-Philippe Morency, University of Southern California, USA - Christopher Peters, Coventry University, UK - Laurel Riek, University of Cambridge, UK IMPORTANT DATES - December 6th, 2010: Submission of manuscripts - By March 18th, 2011: Notification about decisions on initial submissions - By June 17th, 2011: Submission of revised manuscripts - By September 2nd, 2011: Notification about decisions on revised manuscripts - By September 23rd, 2011: Submission of manuscripts with final minor changes - October, 2011: Publication of the special issue on the TiiS website, in the ACM Digital Library, and (shortly afterward) as a printed issue HOW TO SUBMIT Manuscripts will be submitted via the ScholarOne Manuscripts site of the ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (TiiS). All necessary information will be found in the instructions for authors at tiis.acm.org. ABOUT ACM TiiS TiiS (pronounced "T double-eye S") is a new ACM journal for research concerning interactive systems that make use of some form of machine intelligence. TiiS's editorial workflow and infrastructure include innovations designed to ensure journal quality at conference speed. For detailed information, see tiis.acm.org.