Workshop description
Social Skill Training is often used in the multimodal Interaction research community as an umbrella term for systems that aim at training social skills: managing appropriately verbal and nonverbal behaviors when interacting with one or more persons, in relation with various communicative functions such as turn taking and emotions.
People with social affective deficits have difficulties controlling their own social behavior and also suffer from interpreting others’ social behavior. Behavioral therapy (eg with a clinician) and Social Skill Training (SST) are used in medical settings. Patients are trained with a coach to experience social interaction and to reduce social stress. SST includes a role-play of a simulation of actual situations [1,2,3]. In addition to behavioral training, cognitive behavioral therapy [4] and motivational interviewing are also useful to better understand and train social-affective interaction. All these methods are effective but expensive and difficult to access.
This workshop is looking for works describing how interactive, multimodal technology such as virtual agents can be used in social skills training for measuring and training social-affective interactions [5]. Sensing technology now enables analyzing user’s behaviors and physiological signals (heart-rate, EEG, etc). Various signal processing and machine learning methods can be used for such prediction tasks. Beyond sensing, it is also important to analyze human behaviors and model and implement training methods (e.g. by virtual agents, social robots, relevant scenarios, design appropriate and personalized feedback about social skills performance). Such social signal processing and tools can be applied to measure and reduce social stress in everyday situations, including public speaking at schools and workplaces. Target populations include depression, Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD), Schizophrenia, Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), but also a much larger group of different social pathological phenomena.
In this workshop, we invite participants from academia, industry or clinical settings to present and discuss social-affective design of multimodal training for health.
References:
[1] Hiroki Tanaka et al., Embodied conversational agents for multimodal automated social skills training in people with autism spectrum disorders. Plos one, 12(8) (2017).
[2] Hoque Mohammed et al., MACH: My automated conversation coach. UbiComp 2013, Proceedings of the ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (2013).
[3] Bruijnes, M et al., Special issue editorial: Virtual Agents for Social Skills Training. Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces 13: 1 (2019).
[4] Fitzpatrick K et al., Delivering Cognitive Behavior Therapy to Young Adults With Symptoms of Depression and Anxiety Using a Fully Automated Conversational Agent (Woebot): A Randomized Controlled Trial, JMIR Mental Health (2017).
[5] Daniels, J. et al., Exploratory study examining the at-home feasibility of a wearable tool for social-affective learning in children with autism. Nature Digital Med 1, 32 (2018).
[6] Hiroki Tanaka et al., Social Affective Multimodal Interaction for Health. In Proceedings of the 2020 International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, pp.893–894 (2020).
Important dates
All deadlines are set at 23:59 PDT (GMT-7)
Workshop papers or abstract due: August 8, 2021 (extended to August 16, 2021)
Notification of acceptance: September 3, 2021 September 4, 2021
Camera-ready paper: September 15, 2021
Workshop date: October 22
Organizers
Hiroki Tanaka (Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan)
contact: hiroki-tan[at]is.naist.jp
Satoshi Nakamura (Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan)
Jean-Claude Martin (CNRS-LISN, Université Paris Saclay, France)
Catherine Pelachaud (CNRS-ISIR, Sorbonne University, France)
Program Committee
Mathieu Chollet (IMT Atlantique)
Tanja Schneeberger (Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH)
Beatrice Biancardi (LTCI, Télécom Paris, Institut polytechnique de Paris)
Yuichiro Fujimoto (Nara Institute of Science and Technology)
Shogo Okada (Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology)
Shiro Kumano (NTT)
Projects
ANR-CREST-TAPAS Japan - France project
Link