Human Computing

We seem to be entering an era of enhanced digital connectivity. Computers and Internet have become so embedded in the daily fabric of people's lives that they simply cannot live without them. We use this technology to work, to communicate, to shop, to seek out new information, and to entertain ourselves. With this ever-increasing diffusion of computers in society, human-computer interaction (HCI) is becoming increasingly essential to our daily lives. HCI design was first dominated by direct manipulation and then delegation. The tacit assumption of both styles of interaction has been that the human will be explicit, unambiguous and fully attentive while controlling the information and command flow. Boredom, preoccupation, and stress are unthinkable even though they are "very human" behaviors. This insensitivity of current HCI designs is acceptable for well-codified tasks. It works for making plane reservations, buying and selling stocks and, as a matter of fact, almost everything we do with computers today. But this kind of categorical computing is inappropriate for design, debate, and deliberation. In fact, it is the major impediment to having flexible machines capable of adapting to their users and their level of attention, preferences, moods, and intentions, that is, capable of improving the quality of life by anticipating the users needs.

The key to anticipatory interfaces is the ease of use. Usability is synonymous with naturalness for human users, in this case the ability to unobtrusively sense the user's behavioral cues, to learn and to adapt automatically to the particular user behavioral patterns and the context in which the user acts. Thus, instead of focusing on the computer portion of the HCI context, designs for this new kind of technology which could be called Human Computing should focus on the human portion of the HCI context. They should go beyond the traditional keyboard and mouse to include natural, human-like interactive functions including understanding and emulating behavioral and social signaling. The design of these functions will require explorations of what is communicated (linguistic message, non-linguistic conversational signal, emotion, person identification), how the information is communicated (the person's facial expression, head movement, tone of voice, hand and body gesture), why, that is, in which context the information is passed on (where the user is, what his current task is, how he/she feels), and which (re)action should be taken to satisfy user needs and requirements.

Despite the fact that the research on Human Computing is still in its pioneering phase, promising approaches have been reported in the literature in the last couple of years on automatic analysis of human behavior (including affective computing and socially-aware computing) and on multimodal interfaces. This workshop intends to focus on these topics, which form the essence of Human Computing. It intends to bring together leading experts from around the world working in these fields and to provide a state-of-the-art overview of new paradigms and challenges in AI research on Human Computing.

Workshop Topics

• Human Action Recognition (body and hand gestures, facial expressions, gaze, vocal expressions, speech);
• 3D Modelling of Humans;
• Multimodal Human Computer Interaction (body, gaze, gesture, audio, speech);
• Multimodal and Multi-Party interaction management;
• Ambient Intelligence & Ubiquitous Computing;
• Conversational Agents & Interaction in Virtual Worlds;
• Affective and Behavioural Interfaces;
• Socially-aware Computing;
• Machine Learning With a Human-In-The Loop;
• User, Context, and Task Modeling in HCI Systems;
• Context-Sensitive Decision Making in HCI Systems;
• Cultural and Social Issues in Human Computing;
• Applications of Human Computing (assisted living, education, gaming, human-robot interaction, etc.).