CALL FOR PAPERS
mWELL@ACII2023:
International Workshop on Affective Computing for Mental Wellbeing: Challenges, Opportunities, and Promising Synergies
At ACII 2023, the 12th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction
September 10, 2023
MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, MA, USA
Workshop: https://mwell.tbm.tudelft.nl/
ACII 2023: https://acii-conf.net/2023/
Submission deadline: April 28, 2023
The prevalence of mental illness is globally on the rise, leading to high individual and societal burdens. Many people in need do not seek professional help, the ones that do are confronted with limited availability of practitioners, and despite considerable progress, the success rate of therapies remains limited. While more and more digital health solutions are emerging, their adoption and reported success are still low. Affective computing can support several important processes in enhancing and maintaining wellbeing, such as supporting self-awareness by tracking states and behavior using multimodal cues related to verbal and non-verbal communication, physiology, and activities. At the same time, clinicians can use such objective measures to complement traditional questionnaires and improve diagnosis, as well as in developing personalized interventions based on individuals’ affective states and their unique needs and preferences. XR solutions or m-health apps can be enhanced by becoming more responsive and adaptive. Last but not least, such technology can make mental health services more accessible, especially to those facing barriers such as geographic distance, stigma, or lack of resources.
This workshop brings together researchers in Affective Computing (AC), clinicians in the emerging area of digital mental health and digital psychiatry, developers from industry, and policymakers to discuss what aspects of digital mental health apps and tools can most benefit from AC technologies and existing technologies already incorporating AC, such as embodied conversational agents and affective virtual agents, and affect-adaptive human-machine interaction. Since advances in AC and AI in mental health also give rise to important ethical concerns, this workshop aims to identify and address these emerging issues. Topics include the therapeutic relationship with technology and synthetic relationships, more broadly, artificial empathy, transparency (deception), safety, and affective privacy, among others.
The workshop is a satellite event of the 12th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII 2023), taking place on 10 September 2023 at the MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, MA (USA): https://acii-conf.net/2023/.
SUBMISSIONS
This workshop seeks original contributions, including but not limited to:
- Data collection, archiving and retrieval in the context of mental health
- Multimodal recognition of stress, negative affect, sleep, social isolation, or other mental health-related symptoms
- Automatic behavior and affect coding
- Affective modelling
- Analysis of interactions with patients, including synchrony and alliance
- NLP for medical texts analysis
- Multimodal and multi-temporal information fusion in the context of mental health
- Chatbots, virtual humans, XR, serious games, etc. for mental health support
- User-centric design for mental health applications
- Customization, personalisation and adaptation
- User studies on affective computing technology for mental health
- Therapeutic relationship and artificial empathy
- Social and ethical issues regarding the use of affective technologies for mental health support, such as: privacy, trust and bias
We invite submissions in the following formats:
- long papers, maximum 8 pages (7 pages + 1 page for references)
- short papers, maximum 5 pages (4 pages + 1 page for references).
All submissions should be in pdf format following the ACII submission guidelines, using the conference Latex template. Reviews will be double-blind, i.e., articles should be anonymous. Each paper will be sent to at least two expert reviewers and will have one of the organizers assigned as editor.
Papers can be submitted via ACII’s EasyChair platform by selecting the “Workshop: Affective Computing for Mental Wellbeing” track.
Accepted submissions will be published as ACII workshop proceedings. At least one author must register for the conference (under any registration category) and present. A single registration may cover up to three papers.
Selected submissions will be considered for publication in a special issue of the JMIR Mental Health journal.
IMPORTANT DATES:
- Submission: 28 April 2023
- Notification to authors: 9 June 2023
- Camera-ready: 1 August 2023
- Workshop: 10 September 2023
All deadlines are set at 23:59 PDT (GMT-7).
ORGANIZERS:
Iulia Lefter, Delft University of Technology
David Luxton, University of Washington
Alice Baird, Hume AI
Theodora Chaspari, Texas A&M University
Zakia Hammal, Carnegie Mellon University
Marwa Mahmoud, University of Glasgow
Albert Ali Salah, Utrecht University & Bogazici University
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