Foreword

Abstract

It is a pleasure and an honor to have organized the Third International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII). The conference will be held from 10th – 12th September 2009 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The conference series is the premier forum for presenting research in affective computing and related topics. The conference is organized under the auspices of Humaine Association, and continues the tradition of the previous conferences by maintaining the high standard set by its predecessors. The conference program includes oral papers, posters, invited presentations, sessions on special topics, mini-tutorials, doctoral consortium, demos, and pre- and post-conference workshops. For the conference, we received 157 contributed papers for review. Each of these was assessed by no fewer than two reviewers, with a large majority of papers being assessed by three reviewers; 60 submissions (38%) were selected for oral presentation and 33 submissions for poster presentation (an overall acceptance rate of 59%). These papers will be accompanied by 3 invited presentations, by Qiang Ji (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, US); Klaus Scherer (University of Geneva, Switzerland), and Justine Cassell (Northwestern University, US). Three mini tutorials will address a number of challenging issues in the field including modeling emotions in game characters, mental state modeling for brain-computer interfaces, and preference learning for affective modeling. Four special sessions will highlight new trends and challenges in affective computing and intelligent interaction including recognizing non-prototypic emotions from speech, processing real-life affective signals, analyzing emotional content of music and the musical performance, and developing games for training and entertainment (sponsored by the GATE project). A panel session will address one more novel and important challenge – social interaction with robots and virtual agents. The technical program will also present 15 stunning interactive demos. The Doctoral Consortium program consists of 13 student paper presentations. The pre- and post-conference workshops will bring together behavioral, neuro- and computer scientists to purse links between automatic human behavior recognition and related sciences and applications. The Workshop on Affective Brain-Computer Interfaces explores advantages and limitations of using neuro-physiological signals for automatic affect recognition and related applications. The Workshop on Social Signal Processing explores cognitive models, automatic analysis, and machine synthesis of social signals, and possibilities for their usage towards the realization of socially-aware computing (sponsored by the SSPNet project, [FP7/2007-2013] grant agreement 231287). The Behavior Markup Language Workshop will discuss open issues in defining the “core? of BML. The oral presentations, posters, invited addresses, and workshops bring together related communities to share the latest findings and ideas and pursue continuing and new collaborations in research on affective computing and intelligent interaction. By papers, location, and content, this promises to be an excellent edition of the Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction conference series. The conference continues to provide a leading forum for cutting-edge research in human affect modeling, affective computing, and intelligent interaction. We wish all delegates a most enjoyable and productive conference.