Eani

Advances in Human-Computer Interaction

Special Issue on Emotion-Aware Natural Interaction
Call for Papers
Rosalind Picard defined affective computing as “computing that relates to, arises from, ordeliberately influences emotions.” Along with the more recent introduction of neighboring terms such as “human centered” or “anthropocentric,” “pervasive” and “ubiquitous” computing, computers are nolonger deemed as number-crunching machines, but are approached as intelligent and adaptive tools or interfaces within our habitat, helping perform everyday tasks in a more intuitive and yet robustmanner. In most cases, paralinguistic concepts such as mood, attitude, traits, and expressivity can adapt the user experience and present flexible and, therefore, more suitable results. From anengineering point of view, researchers have been investigating different modalities and combinations to provide emotion or affect recognition components. The mapping of raw signals and related features tohigh-level concepts has been mainly driven from claims such as Ekman’s who states that specific facial expressions can be universally recognized across cultures and ages. This claim lends itself well to theexisting algorithms which classify content into discrete categories, and as a result pushed the area into creating training and testing data sets containing only the aforementioned expressions. Inaddition to this, these data sets usually contain cases of extreme expressivity, since these can be distinguished more easily and make it quite difficult to extend. However, everyday human-human andhumancomputer interactions hardly ever contain cases of extreme expressivity or clear occurrences of expressivity ranging from a neu-tral state to the visual, aural, or physiological apexes of an expression.The proposed Special Issue aims to present state-of-theart approaches in the fields of unimodal and multimodal affect analysis, and combine these with techniques that utilize a priori or just-in-time...