Call for papers/brief book chapters: 

Understanding Social Behavior in Dyadic and Small Group Interactions 

(Proceedings of Machine Learning Research – PMLR: https://proceedings.mlr.press/)

Description: Human interaction has been a central topic in psychology and social sciences, aiming at explaining the complex underlying mechanisms of communication with respect to cognitive, affective and behavioral perspectives. From a computational point of view, research in dyadic and small group interactions enables the development of automatic approaches for detection, understanding, modeling and synthesis of individual and interpersonal social signals and dynamics. Many human-centered applications for good (e.g., early diagnosis and intervention, augmented telepresence and personalized assistive agents) depend on devising solutions for such tasks. 

Verbal and nonverbal communication channels are used in dyadic and small group interactions to convey our goals and intentions while building a common ground. During interactions, people influence each other based on the cues they perceive. However, the way we perceive, interpret, react, and adapt to them depends on a myriad of factors (e.g., our personal characteristics, either stable or transient; the relationship and shared history between individuals; the characteristics of the situation and task at hand; societal norms; and environmental factors). To analyze individual behaviors during a conversation, the joint modeling of participants is required due to the existing dyadic or group interdependencies. While these aspects are usually contemplated in non-computational dyadic research, context- and interlocutor-aware computational approaches are still scarce, largely due to the lack of datasets providing contextual metadata in different situations and populations. 

Topics and Motivation: In line with these, we would like to bring together researchers in the field and from related disciplines to discuss the advances and new challenges on the topic of dyadic and small group interactions. We want to put a spotlight on the strengths and limitations of the existing approaches, and define the future directions of the field. In this context, we accept papers/brief book chapters in form of tutorials, surveys, and/or novel technical/scientific contributions addressing the issues related to, but not limited to, these topics:

• Detection, understanding, modeling, prediction and synthesis of individual and interpersonal social signals and dynamics;

• Verbal / nonverbal communication analysis in dyadic and small groups;

• Contextual analysis in dyadic and small groups;

• Datasets, annotation protocols and bias discovering/mitigation methods in dyadic and small groups;

• Interpretability / Explainability in dyadic and small groups;

Researchers that express their interest in contributing to the PMLR proceedings by October 1st may be invited to present a snippet of their research during the ICCV’21 Understanding Social Behavior in Dyadic and Small Group Interactions (DYAD) Workshop (https://chalearnlap.cvc.uab.cat/workshop/44/description/) if they wish to in order to increase visibility of their research and possibly foster multidisciplinary collaboration.

Important dates:

• Title and abstract (optional but strongly encouraged): October 1st, 2021 

• ICCV’21 DYAD workshop: October 16th, 2021

• Paper submission: November 30th, 2021 (extended)

• Author notification: mid-January 2022 (tentative)

• Camera-ready (PMLR): mid-February 2022 (tentative) 

Submission of intent (title and abstract) by email: sergio@maia.ub.es

Paper submission via CMT platform: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/PLMRDYAD2021

More info at: https://chalearnlap.cvc.uab.cat/workshop/44/schedule/ (PMLR track)

ORGANIZATION and CONTACT*

Sergio Escalera*, Computer Vision Center (CVC) and University of Barcelona, Spain <sergio.escalera.guerrero@gmail.com> 

Cristina Palmero*, Computer Vision Center (CVC) and University of Barcelona, Spain <c.palmero.cantarino@gmail.com> 

Wei-Wei Tu, 4Paradigm Inc., China

Albert Clapés, Aalborg University (AAU), Denmark, and Computer Vision Center (CVC) , Spain

Julio C. S. Jacques Junior, Computer Vision Center (CVC/UAB), Spain