NEWS & EVENTS

María Inés Torres (UPV) will give a lecture on VoiceBots in the RTTH Summer School 2019 (RTTHSS2019). The school is sponsored by the Spanish Red Temática en Tecnologías del Habla (RTTH) and organized by the Speech and Natural Language Technologies Department of Vicomtech. The RTTHSS2019 will take place in Donostia-San Sebastián (Spain), from July 2nd to July 5th 2019.

More info: RTTHSS2019 web page

Special Session at Interspeech 2019

Research devoted to understanding the relationship between verbal and nonverbal communication modes, and investigating the perceptual and cognitive processes involved in the coding/decoding of emotional states is particularly relevant in the fields of Human-Human and Human-Computer Interaction.

When it comes to speech, it is unmistakable that the same linguistic expression may be uttered for teasing, challenging, stressing, supporting, inquiring, answering or as expressing an authentic doubt. The appropriate continuance of the interaction depends on detecting the addresser’s mood.

To progress towards a better understanding of such interactional facets, more accurate solutions are needed for defining emotional and empathic contents underpinning daily interactional exchanges, developing signal processing algorithms able to capture emotional features from multimodal social signals and building mathematical models integrating emotional behaviour in interaction strategies.

The themes of this special session are multidisciplinary in nature and closely connected in their final aims to identify features from realistic dynamics of emotional speech exchanges. Of particular interest are analyses of visual, textual and audio information and corresponding computational efforts to automatically detect and interpret their semantic and pragmatic contents.

A special issue of the Journal Computer Speech and Language is foreseen as an outcome of this special session.

Details can be found on the web page: http://www.empathic-project.eu/index.php/ssinterspeech2019/

Organizers:

ANNA ESPOSITO (iiass.annaesp@tin.it; anna.esposito@unicampania.it) – MENHIR
MARIA INÉS TORRES (manes.torres@ehu.eus) – MENHIR
OLGA GORDEEVA (olga.gordeeva@acapela-group.com)
RAQUEL JUSTO (raquel.justo@ehu.eus) – MENHIR
ZORAIDA CALLEJAS CARRIÓN (zoraida@ugr.es) – MENHIR
KRISTIINA JOKINEN (kristiina.jokinen@aist.go.jp
GENNARO CORDASCO (gennaro.cordasco@unicampania.it) – MENHIR
BJOERN SCHULLER (bjoern.schuller@imperial.ac.uk)
CARL VOGEL (vogel@cs.tcd.ie)
ALESSANDRO VINCIARELLI (Alessandro.Vinciarelli@glasgow.ac.uk)
GERARD CHOLLET (gerard.chollet@telecom-paristech.fr) – MENHIR
NEIL GLACKIN (neil.glackin@intelligentvoice.com) – MENHIR

The ECMH want to increase collaboration between service users and professionals in different fields. ECMH believe that services and care processes can be improved with respectful collaboration between different parties. In our conferences every participant’s voice is as important. We give arena for research, practice development, projects and personal experiences. We always have close collaboration with local partners in psychiatric hospitals, universities and service user associations.

The 2019 ECMH Conference is in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Ulster University with the MENHIR consortium has helped arrange a special session on ‘Chatbots in Mental Health’ at the conference.

Organised by Prof Lauri Kuosmanen from University of Eastern Finland, and hosted by Prof Maurice Mulvenna and Dr Raymond Bond from Ulster University, this will comprise 4 discussions with a follow-on Q&A session on the value and context of chatbots in a mental health setting.

The special session includes the following papers:

• Mental Health in the workplace: Using chatbots for self-assessment, Gillian Cameron, Inspire Wellbeing
• Towards a chatbot assisted mental health and wellbeing ecosystem, Brian Cahill, Cork Institute of Technology
• Chatbots for mental health and suicide prevention: is this even ethical? Professor Siobhan O’Neill, Ulster University
• Towards Conversational Coaching Agents to Support Bibliotherapy Sessions, Dr Patrick McAllister, Verbal Arts