Special Session on Assistive and Adaptive End-User Systems

Special Session on Assistive and Adaptive End-User Systems

Session Chair:

Wolfgang Minker, Ulm University, wolfgang.minker(at)uni-ulm(dot)de

In this special session we address a selection of research areas that we consider to be essential for integrating end-user systems into future Intelligent Environments. The capability to flexibly integrate information from various sources and negotiate solutions between these sources and the human user is one important issue for managing the rising complexity of today's and future technical systems. Assistive and proactive dialogue behavior in particular contributes to this endeavor, since it guarantees that the user is informed in the right way at the right time. Another aspect is the use of appropriate system architectures that allow us to integrate the technology in everyday - even small and less powerful - devices. This seems to be essential so as to make these end-user systems accessible for a large public and to increase their usability and acceptability.

Thanks to breathtaking hardware miniaturization and cost reduction, everyday environments (e.g., home, office, car, etc.) are populated today with end-user systems for controlling and automating various tasks in our daily lives. End-user systems are mostly used by non-specialists and without a particular knowledge of complex computer equipment and in their usual context of life. Such systems should therefore be easy to use, non-intrusive and exploit the most natural communication means. Undeniably, enhanced communication and assistive capabilities increase the usability and social acceptability of this kind of system. Spoken natural dialogue is one of the key factors for a user-friendly and consistent user-system interaction. Providing an easy access to these systems, Spoken Dialogue Systems have become an increasingly important interface between humans and computers as they constitute the most natural way of communication.

Paper submissions are encouraged for (but not limited to) the following topics:

  • Multimodal dialogue strategies with a particular focus on problem solving and adaptiveness
  • Affectiveness (Recognition and expression of emotions, affective user modeling and emotional speech synthesis)
  • Architectures for assistive and adaptive end-user systems
  • Evaluation paradigms for usability and user-friendliness of assistive and adaptive end-user systems

Papers may discuss theories, applications, evaluations, limitations, general tools and techniques. Discussion papers that critically evaluate approaches or processing strategies and prototype demonstrations are especially welcome.

 

Contact Person:

Wolfgang Minker, wolfgang.minker(at)uni-ulm(dot)de

 

Important Dates:

Deadline for Manuscript Submission: April 3rd, 2009
Acceptance Decisions: April 24th, 2009
Final Accepted Manuscript: May 10th, 2009

You can submit papers via the conference management system. When submitting, check the box next to this session. You can submit the same paper to one session only.