I. THEMES AND SCOPE OF THE SESSION

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

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

Claudia Greco is with the Università della Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”, Department of Psychology, and the International Institute for Advanced Scientific Studies (IIASS), Italy. Email: claudia.greco@unicampania.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

Carl Vogel is with Trinty College of Dublin, Ireland. Email: carl.vogel@tcd.ie

IV. IMPORTANT DATES

• Paper Submission Deadline: May 8, 2023 (only an extended abstract uploaded to Easy Chair)
• Notification of acceptance: May 20, 2023
• Camera-ready copy: June 7, 2023 (final paper submission max. 8-10 pages)
• Conference Dates: June 7-9, 2023

V. PUBLICATION AND PAGE LIMITATIONS

• The accepted contributions will be published by the Springer series on “Smart Innovation Systems and Technologies” (see http://www.springer.com/series/8767 for formatting guidelines and templates). The maximum paper length is 8-10 pages. All manuscripts should be submitted through the Easy Chair conference system using the following link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wirn2023. When logged into Easy Chair please specify the name of the special session as: “Dynamics of Signal Exchanges and Empathic Systems”
• 4-6 relevant best papers from this special session will be invited to submit significantly extended versions of their presented papers (with at least 60% new content) to be considered for publication in Q1 and Q2 Journals.
• Please do not hesitate to contact Anna Esposito (e-mail: iiass.annaesp@tin.it) or Gennaro Cordasco (e-mail: gennaro.cordasco@unicampania.it) for further clarifications.