ICMI 2026 Workshop

The 2nd International Workshop on Cross-Cultural Multimodal Interaction (CCMI 2026)

This ICMI 2026 workshop aims to establish an international research platform to explore how linguistic and cultural differences shape nonverbal behavior and interaction dynamics. Building on the success of our first workshop, this second edition shifts the focus from problem identification to concrete action and methodological evaluation.

This year’s discussion-centric workshop focuses on two key themes:

Concrete Data Collection & Case Studies: Sharing practical "Case Reports" to overcome the logistical hurdles of multi-site data collection, with the goal of drafting a roadmap for truly cross-cultural multimodal datasets.
Evaluating MLLMs in Cultural Contexts: Developing methodologies to benchmark Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for cultural sensitivity, specifically examining their ability to handle cultural nuances in gestures, facial expressions, and turn-taking.

Updates

The keynote talk has been confirmed (26th, May 2026)
The workshop has been accepted for ICMI 2026! See you in Napoli🙋 (20th, February 2026)

Topics of Interest

It includes (but is not limited to) the following:

Cross-cultural differences in nonverbal communication
Data collection methodologies for intercultural interaction
Cultural variations in gestures, facial expressions, back-channeling, and turn-taking
Multimodal machine learning and signal processing methods for detecting cultural differences
Cross-linguistic differences and universals in turn-taking behavior

Important Dates

Paper Submission July 1st, 2026
Paper Notification July 24th, 2026
Camera Ready July 31st, 2026
Workshop Day October 9th, 2026 (Morning or Afternoon)

Submission Instructions

TBA

Invited Talks

From Cross-Cultural Behavior Analysis to Culturally-Aware Interaction Generation

Elisabeth André (Augsburg University)

Abstract
While certain social signals can be observed across cultures, cultures differ in when, whether, and how such behaviors are displayed. Developing culturally-aware conversational agents, therefore, requires interpreting and generating behavior in relation to culture-specific display rules and social norms. In this talk, I first report on research on cross-cultural multimodal interaction datasets, such as NoXi+J, and on analyses of social behavior conducted in the MultiMediate challenge series, which investigate engagement and conversational behaviors across participants from European and Asian cultural backgrounds. Building on these analyses, the second part of the talk addresses the generation of culturally aware behaviors for socially interactive agents. I discuss our approach for synthesizing culturally adaptive listener behaviors that integrates cultural identity as a conditional factor into a real-time generative model. The talk concludes with a discussion of open challenges for culturally aware AI, including modeling culture-specific behaviors without reinforcing stereotypes.

Biography
Elisabeth André is a Full Professor of Computer Science and the Founding Chair of Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence at Augsburg University, Germany. Her research has been foundational in enabling machines to perceive and respond to human multimodal conversational behaviors in a natural and socially intelligent manner. For her pioneering contributions to socially-interactive artificial intelligence, she was awarded the ICMI Sustained Accomplishment Award and the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize by the German Research Foundation (DFG).