Workshop on Mobile Social Signal Processing

September 7, 2010

Mission

Given their status as a preeminent form of social interaction, mobile phone conversations have been the subject of relatively limited investigation, in terms of social behavior. This leaves open a major gap when two important developments take place. On one hand, Mobile HCI often deals with advanced mobile phones containing a large number of sensors (e.g., GPS, accelerometers, magnetometers, capacitive touch) and with sufficient processing power to capture with unprecedented richness behavior and context of users (e.g., position, movement, hand grip, proximity of social network members, gait type, auditory context). On the other hand, the computing community, in particular Social Signal Processing (SSP), makes significant efforts towards automatic understanding (via analysis of verbal and nonverbal behavior) of social interactions captured with multiple sensors.

This workshop bridges the abovementioned gap by gathering SSP and Mobile HCI researchers. Cross-pollination is expected to extend the investigation area of the two domains and highlight a number of research questions that not only promise to bring significant novelty in both SSP and Mobile HCI, but also require the application of knowledge from both domains to be effectively investigated:

• Is it possible to integrate the input of mobile phone sensors in current approaches for automatic analysis of social phenomena in conversations?
• Does context influence the communication behavior of people talking on the phone?
• Does the transmission of nonverbal behavioral cues, so important in face-to-face communication, improve phone conversation experience?
• Does a better understanding of communication behavior influence the design of mobile phones?
• Can we evaluate how use of a mobile phone affects the key social interaction variables of ‘trust’ and ‘competence’ evaluation?.
• Can we create metrics which help us evaluate the effect on social interaction of augmenting the voice channel with other feedback channels?
• Can we create non-vocal, but embodied interaction techniques which are appropriate for mobile use?
• What would be the ethical issues related to the everyday use of in-hand, automated social signal analysis?

Topics

Workshop topics include (but are not limited to):

• Conversational behavior analysis
• Social Location and Context – measurement, analysis and use
• Social Signal Processing  in design of mobile interactions
• Social Signal Processing in mobile entertainment and wellbeing
• Databases and Social Signal Processing  based content retrieval
• Cognitive modeling, automatic understanding, and synthesis of social phenomena

Important Dates

• Full paper submission: June 15th, 2010
• Notification of Acceptance: June 25th, 2010
• Camera ready paper submission: June 30th, 2010
• Workshop: September 7th, 2010

Paper Submission

Workshop articles will be published by Springer in a volume of the LNCS series. Authors are expected to submit six to eight pages long papers in LNCS/LNAI format (available on the Springer website for Word and Latex).

Papers can be submitted by clicking this link.

The best paper will be considered for inclusion in a special issue of the International Journal of Mobile HCI.

Venue

The workshop takes place in conjunction with Mobile HCI 2010, Lisbon (September 7-10, 2010). The Mobile HCI series provides a forum for academics and practitioners to discuss the challenges and potential solutions for effective interaction with mobile devices and services. It covers the design, evaluation and application of techniques and approaches for all mobile and wearable computing devices and services.

General Chairs

• Alessandro Vinciarelli (University of Glasgow/Idiap Research Institute)
• Rod Murray-Smith (University of Glasgow)
• Herve’ Bourlard (Idiap Research Institute/EPFL)

Program Committee

• Marco Cristani (University of Verona, Italy)
• Anind Dey (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
• Thomas Hermann (University of Bielefeld, Germany)
• Rob Jenkins (University of Glasgow, UK)
• Matt Jones (Swansea University, Wales)
• Juha K. Laurila (Nokia Research Center, Lausanne)
• Dirk Heylen (University of Twente, The Netherlands)
• Eamonn O’Neill (University of Bath, UK)
• Antti Oulasvirta (HIIT, Finland)
• Jean-Marc Odobez (Idiap Research Institute / EPFL)
• Isabella Poggi (Universita’ Roma Tre, Italy)
• Steve Renals (University of Edinburgh, UK)
• Christ Schmandt (MIT, USA)
• Fabio Valente (Idiap Research Institute, Switzerland)