June 30th, 2021 
Daniela Lopez de Luise The first workshop on “What's next in Affect Modeling?” (http://whatnext.tamed-project.eu/) will be held online in conjunction with ACII 2021 (https://www.acii-conf.net/2021/).
*** Description ***
The valid and reliable evaluation of affect and affective interaction is key for the advancement of affective computing (AC). Recent breakthroughs in deep (machine) learning and generative AI have boosted the efficiency and generality of affect models by discovering novel representations of users and their context acting on high resolutions of multimodal signals. Such representations, however, are data hungry and in need of large datasets that AC is not able to offer. Moreover, as affect models gradually become larger and more complex, their expressivity, explainability, and transparency becomes increasingly opaque.
This workshop puts an emphasis on SoTA methods in machine learning and their suitability for advancing the reliability, validity, and generality of affective models. We will be investigating entirely new methods, untried in AC, but also methods that can be coupled with traditional and dominant practices in affective modeling. In particular, we encourage submissions that offer visions of particular algorithmic advancements for affect modeling and proof-of-concept case studies showcasing the potential of new sophisticated machine learning methods.
Topics include but are not limited to:
– Representation learning of affect
– Signal tensorization for affect modelling
– Unsupervised tensor subspace learning and supervised (semi- and self-) tensor-based machine learning for affect modeling
– RL as an affective computing paradigm
– Manifold learning and feature learning
– Contrastive learning paradigms and models for affect modeling
– Neural architecture search and open-ended evolution for affect
– Distributed and Disentangled Affect Representation
– Sophisticated multimodal fusion (e.g. via tensors) of affective signals
– Explainable affect models
– Applications studies in education, art, creativity, health, psychology, and beyond
*** Important dates ***
– Paper submission: 5 July 2021
– Notification of acceptance: 12 July 2021
– Camera-ready submission: 26 July 2021
Keynote Speaker
– Prof. Michel Valstar, School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham
Organizers
– Konstantinos Makantasis, Georgios N. Yannakakis, Bjoern Schuller
** Endorsed by ***
TAMED project: http://www.tamed-project.eu/project
sustAGE EU RIA project: https://www.sustage.eu
