oratory and the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences of the University of Geneva, Switzerland. The conference was
technically cosponsored by the IEEE
Computer Society and by AAAI — the
American Association for Artificial Intelligence. Electronic proceedings were
distributed to the participants on an
USB stick, and all papers will be available on IEEE Xplore. Two special journal issues of selected works presented
at ACII are planned, in the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing (
editor-in-chief, Jonathan Gratch) and in the
Springer Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces (editor-in-chief, Jean-Claude
Martin).
The general chairs of the conference
were Thierry Pun, Catherine
Pelachaud, and Nicu Sebe. the program
chairs were Anton Nijholt, Sidney
D’Mello, and Maja Pantic.
Thierry Pun is a full professor in the Computer Science Department and group leader
of the Computer Vision and Multimedia
Laboratory at the University of Geneva,
Geneva, Switzerland. He earned his Ph.D. at
the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in
Lausanne, Switzerland, was a visiting fellow
at the National Institutes of Health in
Bethesda, Maryland, a research fellow at the
CERN European Laboratory for Particle
Physics, and was as assistant (1986), associate (1989), and now full professor (from
1998) at the University of Geneva. His current research interests are in affective computing and multimodal interaction, such as
physiological and behavioral signals analysis for emotion assessment, affective gaming and learning, affect in social media,
brain-computer interaction, multimodal interfaces for blind users and for the elderly.
Anton Nijholt started his professional life
as a programmer at TNO-Delft. He studied
civil engineering, mathematics, and computer science at Delft University of Technology and completed his Ph.D. in theoretical computer science at the Vrije
Universiteit in Amsterdam. He held positions at the University of Twente, the University of Nijmegen, McMaster University
(Canada), the Vrije Universiteit Brussels
(Belgium), and at NIAS in Wassenaar. For
some years he was scientific advisor of
Philips Research Europe. Presently he is a
member of the Human Media Interaction
group of the University of Twente. His main
research interests are multiparty interaction, multimodal interaction, brain-computer interfacing, and entertainment computing.
the doctoral consortium, and the
demonstrations. Almost all the submissions were of full length. Each paper was reviewed by at least two experts (most papers received three
reviews) and vetted by members of the
Senior Program Committee. On the basis of metareviews, 55 out of the 175
regular papers were accepted as oral
presentations ( 31 percent acceptance
rate), and an additional 48 papers were
accepted for poster presentations (an
overall acceptance rate of 59 percent).
Similar acceptance rates were reached
for the workshops and satellite events.
A number of papers were from industry, major ones as well as startups.
These figures as well as the participation rate clearly establish the prominent role of ACII in the field. As participants, as well as some outsiders,
observed, the whole conference gave
an impression of liveliness, dynamism,
perhaps even gaiety.
The conference was structured as 3
invited keynote talks, 12 regular ses-
sions (oral), 2 poster sessions, a doctor-
al consortium ( 2 oral sessions and
posters), a live demonstration session,
and an artistic event. If one asks what
are the hot technical topics currently
addressed by the community, the an-
swer would of course depend on who
would reply. The three keynote talks
however give a good snapshot of these.
Klaus Scherer (University of Geneva)
spoke about modeling emotion as dy-
namically unfolding component
processes. He emphasized the impor-
tance of computational and dynamic
modeling of the different emotion
components in the course of a given
affective episode. Christine Lisetti
(Florida International University) dis-
cussed affective computing and well-
being. She focused on the creation of
humanistic affective computing sys-
tems that promote healthy lifestyles
and well-being, with the need to pro-
vide users of such systems with the
right intrinsic motivation to use them.
Georgios Yannakakis (University of
Malta, and IT University of Copen-
hagen) talked about computer games:
challenging, advancing, and realizing
affective interaction. He argued that
computer games — be they serious or
not — are the right platforms to elicit,
model, and study complex cognitive,
affective, and behavioral responses,
thereby advancing research on hu-
man-computer interaction at large.
As a special feature of ACII 2013, an
hour-long artistic event, called Mood
Conductor, was performed by the
VoXP band (France), during which the
audience had the opportunity to conduct the performers by communicating emotional intentions to them
through a smartphone-friendly application. Another original event was the
live recording and public display of
physiological signals from the main
presenters and participants of the conference opening as a way to exemplify
the importance of real-time measurements and biofeedback in affective
computing.
The conference was preceded by a
full day of five workshops: Affective
Interaction in Natural Environments,
organized by Ginevra Castellano,
Kostas Karpouzis, Jean-Claude Martin,
Louis-Philippe Morency, Christopher
Peters, and Laurel Riek; Context Based
Affect Recognition, organized by Zakia
Hammal and Merlin Teodosia Suarez;
Mediated Touch and Affect, organized
by Gijs Huisman, Nadia Bianchi-Berthouze, and Dirk Heylen; Affective
Brain-Computer Interfaces, organized
by Brendan Allison, Guillaume
Chanel, Christian Muehl, and Anton
Nijholt; and Festschrift for Roddy
Cowie and Ellen Douglas-Cowie, organized by Dorothy Cowie and
Catherine Pelachaud.
Three awards were presented during
the conference: the Outstanding Paper
Award, presented to Harry J. Griffin,
Min S. H. Aung, Bernardino Romera-Paredes, Gary McKeown, William Curran, Ciaran McLoughlin, and Nadia
Bianchi-Berthouze, for Laughter Type
Recognition from Whole Body Motion; the Technicolor Outstanding Student Paper award, presented to Jérôme
Urbain, Hüseyin Cakmak, and Thierry
Dutoit, for Automatic Phonetic Transcription of Laughter and its Application to Laughter Synthesis; and the
Fiorella de Rosis Award for an Outstanding Doctoral Consortium Paper,
presented to Jyoti Joshi, for An Automated Framework for Depression
Analysis.
ACII 2013 was organized by the
Computer Vision and Multimedia Lab-