FLAIRS Special Track

May 7 - 9, 2007, Key West, Florida, USA

 

At the 2007 FLAIRS Conference

(http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~ddd/FLAIRS/flairs2007/) a Special Track will be devoted to "AI and Ambient Entertainment": http://hmi.cs.utwente.nl/flairs07

 

Final Call for Papers:

In future Ambient Intelligence (AmI) environments we assume intelligence embedded in the environment, its objects (furniture, mobile robots) and in its virtual, sometimes visualized agents (virtual humans). These environments support the human inhabitants or visitors of these environments in their activities and interactions by perceiving them through sensors (proximity sensors, cameras, microphones, etc.). Support can be reactive but also, and more importantly, pro-active, anticipating the needs of the inhabitants and visitors.

Health, recreation, sports and playing games are among these needs.

Sensors in these environments can detect and interpret bodily activity and can give multimedia feedback to invite, stimulate, guide and advise on bodily activity. Rather than aiming at improving user task efficiency, in these ambient entertainment environments the aim is to improve physical and mental health (well-being) through exercise and through play. Exercises can be done in order to improve fitness, to prevent certain injuries (e.g., RSI), or to recover from an accident (e.g., physiotherapy exercises). Other exercises may aim at improving certain capabilities related to a profession (ballet, etc.), some kind of recreation (juggling, etc.), or sports (fencing, etc.). Fun, just fun, achieved from interaction (e.g. dancing or physical gaming) can be another aim of such environments.

One underlying assumption is that emphasis on activities in which the experience rather than the outcome will lead to results on designing intelligent systems that are important for ambient intelligence home environments. An ambient intelligence home environment should be attentive, aware of the user needs, but not always aim for the most efficient solution and thereby not allowing the inhabitants a possible experience. That is, the ambient intelligent home environment should sometimes act as a dance partner.

 

In this FLAIRS Special Track we look at games and other leisure activities that require and encourage physical body movements. Hence, we look at bodily and gestural interaction with game and leisure environments equipped with sensors (cameras, microphones, touch and proximity sensors) and some application-dependent intelligence (allowing reactive and proactive activity). Interpretation of the bodily interaction, requiring domain-dependent artificial intelligence, needs to be done by the environment and the agents that maintain the interaction with the human partner. In the display of reactive and pro-active activity embodied virtual agents play an important role. They can play the role of teacher, coach, partner or buddy.

 

Papers are invited on all AI aspects of Ambient Entertainment (AmE), in particular on:

*     Edutainment and Entertainment Requiring Bodily Activity

*     Audio-visual Processing of Human Bodily Activity

*     Bodily Interaction Models and Interaction Planning

*     Music and Sound Stimulating Bodily Interaction

*     Establishing and Maintaining Partner Contact

*     Human Motion Analysis and Interpretation

*     Gaze and Facial Expression Analysis and Generation

*     Interpersonal Attraction and Development of Relationships

*     Persuasive and Seducing Interaction Technology

*     Motor, Cognitive & Communicative Behavior of Virtual Agents

 

 

Submissions

Interested authors must submit an electronic PDF copy of their complete manuscript of no more than 6 pages by November 20, 2006. Please send submissions for these Special Tracks to Anton Nijholt, anijholt@cs.utwente.nl . Author guidelines can be found at the FLAIRS 2007 website (http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~ddd/FLAIRS/flairs2007/). All accepted Special Tracks papers will appear in the conference proceedings published by AAAI Press.

 

Contact Information:

Anton Nijholt

University of Twente

Department of Computer Science

PO Box 217, 7500 AE Enschede, the Netherlands

Email: anijholt@cs.utwente.nl

Tel.: +31 53 4893470

Fax: +31 53 4893503

Homepage: http://hmi.cs.utwente.nl/~anijholt

 

 

Important Dates

Paper submissions due November 20, 2006

 

Notification letters sent January 21, 2007

Camera ready copy due February 11, 2007

Conference Dates: May 7 - 9, 2007, Key West, Florida, USA.

 

 

Program Committee

Chairs: Anton Nijholt, University of Twente, Enschede, the Netherlands & Maja Pantic, Imperial College, London, United Kingdom

 

Jan Borchers, University of Aachen, Aachen, Germany; Wijnand IJsselstijn, University of Eindhoven, the Netherlands; W. Lewis Johnson, University of Southern California, Marina del Rey, USA; Ana Paiva, IST-Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal; Zsofia Ruttkay, University of Twente, Enschede, the Netherlands; Oliviero Stock, ITC-irst, Trento, Italy; Daniel Thalmann, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland; Gerrit van der Veer, Open Universiteit, Heerlen, the Netherlands; Bert Bongers, University of Eindhoven, the Netherlands; Mark Overmars, University of Utrecht, the Netherlands