CFP: First International Workshop on Human Aspects in Ambient Intelligence

[F Sadri]

First International Workshop on
Human Aspects in Ambient Intelligence

Darmstadt, Germany, November 10, 2007

Workshop at the European Conference on Ambient Intelligence (AmI’07)
Call for Papers

Background
The environment in which humans operate has an important influence on 
their wellbeing and performance. For example, a comfortable workspace 
may improve the productivity of an employee, and an attentive partner or 
acquaintance may contribute to preventing more severe health problems by 
early detection. As another example, our car may warn us when we are 
falling asleep while driving or when we are too drunk to drive. 
Developments within Ambient Intelligence provide possibilities to 
contribute to such personal care. This can be based on the one hand on 
possibilities to acquire sensor information about humans and their 
functioning, but on the other hand, more far-reaching applications 
crucially depend on the availability of adequate knowledge for analysis 
of such information about human functioning. If such knowledge about 
human functioning is computationally available in devices in the 
environment, these devices can show more human-like understanding and 
contribute to such personal care based on this understanding.

In recent years, scientific areas focusing on humans such as cognitive 
science, psychology, neuroscience and biomedical sciences have made 
substantial progress in providing an increased insight in the various 
physical and mental aspects of human functioning. Although much work 
still remains to be done, models have been developed for a variety of 
such aspects and the way in which humans (try to) manage or regulate 
them. From a more biomedical angle, examples of such aspects are 
(management of) heart functioning, diabetes, eating regulation 
disorders, and HIV-infection. From a more psychological and social 
angle, examples are emotion regulation, attention regulation, addiction 
management, trust management, stress management, and criminal behaviour 
management.

If such models of human processes and their management are represented 
in a formal and computational format, and incorporated in the human 
environment in devices that monitor the physical and mental state of the 
human, then such devices are able to perform a more in depth analysis of 
the human’s functioning. This can result in an environment that has a 
human-like understanding of humans and that may more efffectively affect 
the state of humans by undertaking in a knowledgeable manner actions 
that improve their wellbeing and performance. For example, the 
workspaces of naval officers may include systems that, among others, 
track their eye movements and characteristics of incoming stimuli (e.g., 
airplanes on a radar screen), and use this information in a 
computational model that is able to estimate where their attention is 
focussed at. When it turns out that an officer neglects parts of a radar 
screen, such a system can either indicate this to the person, or arrange 
on the background that another person or computer system takes care of 
this neglected part. In applications like this, an ambience is created 
that has a more human-like understanding of humans, based on 
computationally formalised knowledge from the human-directed 
disciplines. For example, this may concern elderly people, criminals and 
psychiatric patients, but also, as the example shows, humans in highly 
demanding circumstances or tasks.


Aims

This workshop addresses multidisciplinary aspects of Ambient 
Intelligence with human-directed disciplines such as psychology, social 
science, neuroscience and biomedical sciences. The aim is to get people 
together from these disciplines or working on cross connections of 
Ambient Intelligence with these disciplines. The focus is on the use of 
knowledge from these disciplines in Ambient Intelligence applications, 
in order to take care of and support in a knowledgeable manner humans in 
their daily living in medical, psychological and social respects. The 
workshop can play an important role, for example, to get modellers in 
the psychological, neurological, social or biomedical disciplines 
interested in Ambient Intelligence as a high-potential application area 
for their models, and, for example, get inspiration for problem areas to 
be addressed for further developments in their disciplines. From the 
other side, the workshop may make researchers in Computer Science, and 
Artificial and Ambient Intelligence more aware of the possibilities to 
incorporate more substantial knowledge from the psychological, 
neurological social and biomedical disciplines in Ambient Intelligence 
architectures and applications, and may offer problem specifications 
that can be addressed by the human-directed sciences.

Some of the areas of interest

· computational modelling of psychological, neurological, social and 
biomedical processes for Ambient Intelligence
· collecting and analysing histories of behaviour
· computational modelling of mind reading, Theory of Mind
· building profiles; user modelling in Ambient Intelligence
·sensoring; e.g., tracking physiological states, gaze, body movements, 
gestures
· analysis of sensor information; e.g., voice and skin analysis with 
respect to emotional states, gesture analysis, heart rate analysis
·environmental modelling and awareness
·analysis of applications to care of humans in need of support for 
physical and mental health; e.g., elderly or
psychiactric care, surveillance, penitentiary care, humans in need of 
regular medical or psychological care, support for 
psychotherapeutical/selfhelp communities
·analysis of applications to support humans in demanding circumstances 
and tasks, such as warfare officers, air traffic controllers, crisis and 
disaster managers, humans in space missions.
·responsive and adaptive systems; agent system approaches
·human interaction with devices
·handling aspects of privacy and security; philosophical and ethical aspects

Submission and Proceedings

Papers can be submitted of at most 18 pages in Springer LNCS format (as 
for the AmI’07 conference). Proceedings will be available at the 
workshop. The intention is to realise publication of extended 
postproceedings as a book on the workshop theme by a recognized 
publisher after the workshop. More submission details will follow at the 
workshop’s Website: http://www.few.vu.nl/~treur/HAwsCfP.htm.

Important Dates

Submission Deadline              August 1, 2007
Notification of Acceptance       September 20, 2007
Camera ready papers              October 25, 2007
Workshop                         November 10, 2007

Coordination Commitee

Tibor Bosse (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Agent Systems Research Group)
Cristiano Castelfranchi (CNR Rome, Institute of Cognitive Sciences and 
Technologies)
Mark Neerincx (TNO Human Factors; Technical University Delft,Man-Machine 
Interaction)
Fariba Sadri  Imperial College, Department of Computing)
Jan Treur    (contact person, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Agent 
Systems Research Group)


Programme Committee (partly to be confirmed)
Gerhard Andersson       (Linköping University, Department of Behavioural 
Sciences)
Juan Carlos Augusto     (University of Ulster, School of Computing and 
Mathematics)
Tibor Bosse                  (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Agent 
Systems Research Group)
Antonio Camurri           (University of Genoa, InfoMus Lab)
Nick Cassimatis            (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Cognitive 
Science Department)
Cristiano Castelfranchi (CNR Rome, Institute of Cognitive Sciences and 
Technologies)
James L. Crowley        (INRIA Rhone-Alpes, Perception and Integration 
for Smart Spaces Group)
Pim Cuijpers                 (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Clinical 
Psychology)
Henk Elffers                (Institute for Criminology and Law; Antwerp 
University, Faculty of Law)
Rino Falcone                (CNR Rome, Institute of Cognitive Sciences 
and Technologies)
Dirk Heylen                 (University of Twente, Human Media Interaction)
Ingrid Heynderickx       (Philips Research Netherlands)
Anthony Jameson         (DFKI, Human-Computer Interaction)
Paul Lukowicz              (Austrian University for Health Sciences, 
Medical Informatics and Technology)
Isaac Marks                 (King’s College London, Institute of 
Psychiatry/Maudsley Hospital)
Silvia Miksch                (Danube University Krems, Department of 
Information and Knowledge Engineering)
Scott Moss                   (Manchester Metropolitan University, Centre 
for Policy Modelling)
Mark Neerincx             (TNO Human Factors; Technical University 
Delft, Man-Machine Interaction)
Fariba Sadri                (Imperial College, Department of Computing)
Matthias Scheutz          (University of Notre Dame, Artificial 
Intelligence and Robotics Laboratory)
Elizabeth Sklar              (City University of New York, Brooklyn 
College, Dept of Computer and Information Science)
Ron Sun                       (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 
Cognitive Science Department)
Jan Treur                     (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Agent 
Systems Research Group)
Robert L. West            (Carleton University, Department of Cognitive 
Science)