Dr. Jonathan Gratch announced as Editor in Chief

The IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing is please to announce the appointment of the inaugural Editor in Chief, Dr. Jonathan Gratch. Dr. Gratch is a respected researcher in the field who is an Associate Director for Virtual Humans Research at the University of Southern California's (USC) Institute for Creative Technologies, a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science, and co-director of USC's Computational Emotion Group. He completed his PhD degree in computer science at the University of Illinois in Urban-Champaign in 1995. Dr. Gratch's research focuses on virtual humans (artificially intelligent agents embodied in a human-like graphical body), and computational models of emotion. He studies the relationship between cognition and emotion, the cognitive processes underlying emotional responses, and the influence of emotion on decision making and physical behavior. A recent emphasis of this work is on social emotions, emphasizing the role of contingent nonverbal behavior in the co-construction of emotional trajectories between interaction partners. His research has been supported by the US National Science Foundation, DARPA, AFOSR, and RDECOM. He is on the editorial board of the journal Emotion Review and is the president of the HUMAINE Association for Research on Emotions and Human-Machine Interaction. He is a sitting member of the organizing committee for the International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA) and a frequent organizer of conferences and workshops on emotion and virtual humans. He belongs to the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and the International Society for Research on Emotion. Dr. Gratch is the author of more than 100 technical articles.

Call for Papers for IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing

Affective Computing is the field of study concerned with understanding, recognizing and utilizing human emotions in the design of computational systems. Research in the area is motivated by the fact that emotion pervades human life – emotions motivate human behavior, they promote social bonds between people and between people and artifacts, and emotional cues play an important role in forecasting human mental state and future actions. Technology is less efficient if it perturbs human emotions; more efficient if it engages with them productively; more attractive if it appeals to human emotions; and often it is primarily concerned with enabling humans to experience particular emotions (notably happiness). Since the coining of the term by Picard in 1997, affective computing has emerged as a cohesive sub-discipline in computer science with its own international conference (the International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction) and professional society (the HUMAINE Association).

The IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing is intended to be a cross disciplinary and international archive journal aimed at disseminating results of research on the design of systems that can recognize, interpret, and simulate human emotions and related affective phenomena. The journal will publish original research on the principles and theories explaining why and how affective factors condition interaction between humans and technology, on how affective sensing and simulation techniques can inform our understanding of human affective processes, and on the design, implementation and evaluation of systems that carefully consider affect among the factors that influence their usability. Surveys of existing work will be considered for publication when they propose a new viewpoint on the history and the perspective on this domain. The journal covers but is not limited to the following topics:

Sensing & Analysis

• Algorithms and features for the recognition of affective state from face and body gestures
• Analysis of text and spoken language for emotion recognition
• Analysis of prosody and voice quality of affective speech
• Recognition of auditory and visual affect bursts
• Recognition of affective state from central (e.g. fMRI, EEG) and peripheral (e.g. GSR) physiological measures
• Methods for multi-modal recognition of affective state
• Recognition of group emotion
• Methods of data collection with respect to psychological issues as mood induction and elicitation or technical methodology as motion capturing
• Tools and methods of annotation for provision of emotional corpora

(Cyber)Psychology & Behavior

• Clarification of concepts related to ‘affective computing' (e.g., emotion, mood, personality, attitude) in ways that facilitate their use in computing.
• Computational models of human emotion processes (e.g., decision-making models that account for the influence of emotion; predictive models of user emotional state)
• Studies on cross-cultural, group and cross-language differences in emotional expression
• Contributions to standards and markup language for affective computing

Behavior Generation & User Interaction

• Computational models of visual, acoustic and textual emotional expression for synthetic and robotic agents
• Models of verbal and nonverbal expression of various forms of affect that facilitate machine implementation
• Methods to adapt interaction with technology to the affective state of users
• Computational methods for influencing the emotional state of people
• New methods for defining and evaluating the usability of affective systems and the role of affect in usability
• Methods of emotional profiling and adaptation in mid- to long-term interaction
• Application of affective computing including education, health care, entertainment, customer service, design, vehicle operation, social agents/robotics, affective ambient intelligence, customer experience measurement, multimedia retrieval, surveillance systems, biometrics, music retrieval and generation

For more information about our submission guidelines: Click here. To submit a paper, go to https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/taffc-cs.

TAC is a joint publication of the:

Published in cooperation with: IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, IEEE Signal Processing  Society, IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology, IEEE Consumer Electronics Society, IEEE Circuits and Systems Society