NEWS & EVENTS

The MENHIR project is organizing the conference: Inaugural International Digital Mental Health and Wellbeing Conference that will be held in Belfast (Northern Ireland) from 22 to 23 June 2023.

Location/venue

Ulster University, Belfast campus, York Street, Northern Ireland, UK.

Chairs

• Prof. Raymond Bond
• Dr Edel Ennis
• Prof. Maurice Mulvenna

Conference Summary

Special Session on Social and Biometric data for Applications in human machine interactions: Models and algorithms (SOBIOAPPS)
In Conjunction with the 7th IEEE Cyber Science and Technology Congress (CyberSciTech 2022) – http://cyber-science.org/2022/cyberscitech/
September 12-15, 2022
Sponsored by IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society; EMPATHIC: http://www.empathic-project.eu/; MENHIR: https://menhir-project.eu/; SIROBOTICS: https://www.exprivia.it/en/show-info-event-full.php?id_event=7907; ANDROIDS: https://www.psicologia.unicampania.it/android-project

The aim of this SPECIAL SESSION is to provide an overview of ideas and methods for developing autonomous systems capable to act as socially and emotionally believable assistive interfaces. To this aim, data gathered from behavioural and social experiments, biometrics measurements, and models of social and individual behaviours are considered as signals to be processed and interpreted through new proposed algorithms and theoretical frameworks. These interdisciplinary facets found relevant applications in ICT interfaces for monitoring the health and affective states of their users, gather their psychological feelings and behavioural patterns, and support them through suitably designed interventions.
The call is open to contributors of diverse disciplinary backgrounds such as psychologists, health scientists, computer scientists, cognitive scientists, philosophers, and more.
TOPICS: Topics include but are not limited to:
– Analysis and identification of affective wellbeing and emotional states
– Case studies for detection of health status and personal health informatics
– Supervised and unsupervised algorithms for psychological and health status identification
– Application Oriented Redefinition of “Emotions”
– Computational models of emotions and Electronic health records (EHR) data mining
– Emotional speech algorithms and Facial affect detection
– Physiological monitoring systems
– Computational Architectures for Affective Systems
– Personalized Decision Support Systems for healthcare and wellbeing
– AI for Precision Medicine and Examples of precision medicine in human disease treatment and prevention
– Human and/or machine encoding and decoding of behavioral patterns
– Unimodal and Multi-modal analysis of behaviors (speech, facial expressions, gesture)
–  ….
IMPORTANT DATES
Paper Submission Dues: June 1, 2022
Notification of acceptance: July 1, 2022
Camera-ready submission: July 15, 2022
Conference Dates: Sept 12-15, 2022

The themes of this special session are multidisciplinary in nature, and closely connected in their final aims to identifying features from realistic dynamics of signal exchanges. Such dynamics characterize, formal and informal social signals, communication modes, hearing and vision processes, and brain functionalities. Of particular interest are analyses of visual, written and auditory information and corresponding computational efforts to automatically detect and interpret their semantic and pragmatic contents. Related applications of these interdisciplinary facets are ICT interfaces able to detect health and affective states of their users, interpret their psychological and behavioral patterns and support them through positively designed interventions aiming at improving their quality of life.

II. TOPICS

Relevant topics include but are not limited to:

• Empathic conversational systems and agent
• Applications for mental health and wellbeing
• Signals for detecting affective wellbeing and emotional states
• Detection of health and psychological states from multimodal signals
• Social networks for information spread and share
• Empathic ICT interfaces
• Computational Architectures for Affective Systems
• Supervised and Unsupervised Learning Algorithms in Affective Systems
• Human and/or machine encoding and decoding of behavioral patterns
• Human daily cognitive activities
• …

III. PROGRAM CO-CHAIRS:

Anna Esposito is with the Università della Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”, Department of Psychology and the International Institute for Advanced Scientific Studies (IIASS), Italy. Email: iiass.annaesp@tin.it

Zoraida Callejas is with University of Granada, Departamento de Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos, Granada, Spain. Email: zoraida@ugr.es

Marialucia Cuciniello is with the Università della Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”, Department of Psychology, and the International Institute for Advanced Scientific Studies (IIASS), Italy. Email: marialucia.cuciniello@unicampania.it

Antonietta M. Esposito is with the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, Sezione di Napoli Osservatorio Vesuviano, Napoli, Italy. Email: antonietta.esposito@ingv.it

Gennaro Cordasco is with the Università della Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”, Department of Psychology and the International Institute for Advanced Scientific Studies (IIASS), Italy. Email: gennaro.cordasco@unicampania.it

Nelson Mauro Maldonato is with the Università di Napoli “Federico II”, Dipartimento di Neuroscienze and Reproductive Odontostomatological Sciences, Italy. Email: nelsonmauro.maldonato@unina.it

Francesco Carlo Morabito is with the Università degli Studi “Mediterranea” di Reggio Calabria, Italy. Email: morabito@unirc.it

IV. IMPORTANT DATES

• Paper Submission Deadline: Jun 30, 2022 (only an extended abstract uploaded to Easy Chair)
• Notification of acceptance: Jul 30, 2022
• Camera-ready copy: Sept 1, 2022 (final paper submission max. 8-10 pages)
• Conference Dates: Sept 7-9, 2022

The Internacional Doctoral Summer School in Conversational Systems for Health Applications that will take place in the beutiful Carmen de la Victoria (Granada, Spain) from 31st August to 3rd September 2022. It provides a platform for getting to know and discuss current approaches and research streams in the field of conversational systems with a focus on applications in the health domain. The aim is to bring together early-stage and senior researchers in computer science, psychology, and engineering as well as domain experts in the health sector in an international, multidisciplinary learning experience to help young researchers to improve their academic foundation and expand their skill set. The format of the summer school comprises keynote contributions given by experienced researchers (check the programme here) followed by engaging discussions in small breakout groups. Topics of these discussions will emerge from the PhD-thesis topics of the participants.

More information: https://menhir-project.eu/index.php/2022-menhir-doctoral-school/

MENHIR member María Inés Torres is part of the Steering Committee of the CUI2022 conference, that will take place in Glasgow from 26th to 28th July 2020.

CUI 2022 aims to further develop a collaborative community around human-computer interaction issues in speech and language technology, with a specific interest in theory-based and applied scientific issues in the field of speech and text-based conversational user interfaces.

More information: https://www.conversationaluserinterfaces.org/2022/

Submission deadline: 23rd February 2022

MENHIR members Maurice Mulvenna and Jane Zheng from Ulster University are co-organizing the First International Workshop on Trustworthy AI for the Future of Risk Management (TAI-RM 2022) in Belfast on 14th June.

Topics

Potential topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Novel theoretical achievements for TAI methodology.
• Novel developments for existing TAI techniques.
• Practical deployment of TAI within different domains: best practices and lessons learned.
• Reviews highlighting important challenges and open problems within TAI.
• Case studies of use response to TAI techniques and AI model outputs.
• Novel datasets for use within the TAI in application community.
• Discussion on industry areas where how best to leverage TAI moving forward.
• TAI related regulation description and enforcement.

Sessión at NVIDIA GTC 2

Summary: Conversational AI applications are comprised of a hierarchy of deep learning natural language processing (NLP) models and speech technologies. Making these many different components work together to realize robust real-world applications a complex, both in terms of model interaction and computing resource orchestration. Deploying NLP models for processing speech requires end-to-end speech recognition, appropriate segmentation, and robust NLP model training processes that can cope with speech recognition transcription errors. In addition, effective conversational AI applications rely on numerous preprocessing models such as punctuation restoration, true casing, question classification, negation, and many others to ensure robust operation and reduction of false positives. We’ll present real-world contact center and medical consultation decision support cases to illustrate how such complex conversational AI ecosystems should be constructed.

Presenter: Nigel Cannings, CTO, Intelligent Voice, Ltd.

Join for free here: https://www.nvidia.com/gtc/session-catalog/?search=S41145&search=S41145%2C%20S41145&tab.scheduledorondemand=1583520458947001NJiE&utm_content=201705046&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&hss_channel=tw-164683799#/session/1634832058529001pf9B

On February 23-24, the “Cancer Survivorship – AI for Well-being” (CS_AIW) Cluster will hold its 4th Meeting of Minds, the first to be open to the public, as patients and survivors will be part of the audience. In fact, the event will revolve around the question “How can new technologies better support patients?“.

More information: https://www.h2020-faith.eu/2022/01/new-technology-in-cancer-care-cs_aiw-cluster-mom-4/

Register here: https://www.eventbrite.it/e/251100707977

MENHIR coordinator Zoraida Callejas will participate in a roundtable about natural language processing in international projects organized by the DiverTLes community (Diversity in Language Technologies in Spain).

More info: https://gplsi.dlsi.ua.es/pln/node/550

In Spanish:

La comunidad DiverTLes: Diversidad en Tecnologías del Lenguaje en España, iniciativa dentro del marco de la red temática de excelencia PLNnet, se complace en presentar la Mesa redonda “PLN en proyectos internacionales” que se celebrará virtualmente el próximo 18 de enero a las 17.30 horas.

En esta ocasión contaremos con 3 ponentes (Zoraida Calleja, Elena González y Elena Lloret) que actualmente se encuentran implicadas en interesantes proyectos internacionales en los que las tecnologías del lenguaje juegan un papel importante. Las ponentes nos presentarán sus proyectos y podremos comentar diferentes aspectos. En esta ocasión la mesa será moderada por Encarna Segarra, profesora e investigadora en PLN de la Universidad Politécnica de Valencia. Cada una de las ponentes expondrá su trabajo durante 5-7 minutos para posteriormente establecer un debate entre los asistentes que podrán plantear preguntas, dudas o apreciaciones. El tiempo estimado para todo el evento será de una hora en total.

Para asistir al evento gratuito hace falta inscripción a través de este formulario y recibiréis directamente los datos de conexión a la mesa redonda a través de Google Meet.

Following the successful ACM In-Cooperation CUI conferences in 2019 and 2020, CUI 2021 will be a hybrid conference with sessions online and in person in Bilbao, Spain. The conference will run from 27–29 July 2021.

Topics relevant to the conference include, but are not limited to:

• voice user experience
• speech interfaces
• speech interface theory development
• conversational interaction through technology
• text-based conversational interfaces
• chatbots
• speech synthesis
• speech recognition
• dialogue management
• conversational interface design insights
• conversational search
• methods for conversational user interface development and evaluation
• multimodal interaction involving speech, text or other language based interfaces

More information: https://www.conversationaluserinterfaces.org/2021/

Involvement of MENHIR participants:

• General co-chair: María Inés Torres
• Co-assistant to the general chairs: Raquel Justo
• Programme Committee: Zoraida Callejas, Anna Esposito, Raquel Justo, María Inés Torres