- Role of Special Issues
- Interactive Computational Visual Analytics (Submission by May 31st, 2012)
- Human Decision Making and Recommender Systems (Submissions Being Reviewed)
- Interaction with Smart Objects (Submissions Being Reviewed)
- Highlights of the Decade in Interactive Intelligent Systems (Revisions Being Reviewed / Accepted)
- Internet-Scale Human Problem Solving (In press)
- Common Sense for Interactive Systems (Revisions Being Reviewed / Accepted)
- Personalization and Persuasion (In press)
- Eye Gaze in Intelligent Human-Machine Interaction (Published)
- Affective Interaction in Natural Environments (Published)
Role of Special Issues
As a supplement to its main stream of regular articles, TiiS publishes special issues on selected topics for which it can be expected that several articles can be accepted that meet the traditional high standards of ACM journals.
A special issue has the benefit of offering readers a concentration of related articles on an important or emerging topic.
Since a journal issue that includes a special issue will typically include one or more regular articles as well, the publication of regular articles is not delayed by special issues.
Interactive Computational Visual Analytics (Submission by May 31st, 2012)
Aims and Scope
Visual analytics is defined as “the science of analytical reasoning facilitated by visual interactive interfaces.” Since its inception in 2006, the field has grown to encompass a wide array of topics relating to the theory, design, and development of interactive visual interfaces for the purposes of data exploration, data analysis, sense making, and decision making.
While the scope of visual analytics is broad, one principle that has emerged over the years is the need for visual analytics systems to leverage computational methods in data mining, knowledge discovery, and machine learning for large-scale data analysis. In these systems, the human operator works alongside the computational processes in an integrated fashion - the computer can sift through large amounts of data and identify the relevant information, while the human interactively explores the reduced data space to discover trends and patterns and make informed decisions. The two components operate in coordination, allowing for a continuous and cooperative analytical loop.
This special issue will publish papers that address how computational methods can be integrated into interactive visualization systems from a variety of perspectives. The dimensions listed below indicate the range of work that is relevant to the special issue. In case of doubt about the relevance of your topic, please contact the guest editors.
Topic Dimensions
Models, Theory, and Methods for Interactive Computational Visual
Analytics- Mathematical foundations of data transformations
- Data management and knowledge representation
- Integration of multiple or disparate simulation models
- Interaction, analytical discourse, and sensemaking
- Analytic provenance and quantification and storage of interactions
- ...
Real-World Applications Using Interactive Computational Visual
Analytics- Large-scale (real-world scale) data
- High-dimensional data
- Real-time data
- Streaming data
- Geospatial data
- ...
Evaluation of Interactive Computational Visual Analytics
- Empirical and observational studies
- User studies with general implications
- Novel evaluation techniques
- ...
Special Issue Associate Editors
- Remco Chang, Tufts University (contact: remco[at]cs[dot]tufts[dot]edu)
- David Ebert, Purdue University
- Daniel Keim, University of Konstanz
Important Dates
- By May 31st, 2012: Submission of manuscripts
- By September 13th, 2012: Notification about decisions on initial submissions
- By December 12th, 2012: Submission of revised manuscripts
- By February 10th, 2013: Notification about decisions on revised manuscripts
- By March 12th, 2013: Submission of manuscripts with final minor changes
- Starting April, 2013: Publication of the special issue on the TiiS website and subsequently in the ACM Digital Library and as a printed issue
Human Decision Making and Recommender Systems (Submissions Being Reviewed)
Aims and Scope
A primary function of recommender systems is to help people make good choices and decisions. But in research on recommender systems, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to the decision making processes of users. Instead, it has focused mainly on (a) ways of eliciting and modeling users’ preferences and (b) algorithms for identifying items that a user is likely to evaluate positively. Even systems that do explicitly aim to support the decision making process could benefit from greater use of knowledge about human decision making. And the growing amount of research on users’ interaction with recommender systems, which aims to enhance their usability and acceptance, can be expanded to consider support for specific aspects of decision making.
This special issue will highlight research that explicitly considers ways in which an understanding of human choice and decision making can benefit research and practice on recommender systems. The dimensions listed below indicate the range of work that is relevant to the special issue. In case of doubt about the relevance of your topic, please contact the special issue associate editors.
Topic Dimensions
Types of Decision Made by Users of Recommender Systems
- Decisions about items in some domain (e.g., products, documents, ...)
- Decisions about actions performed as part of the domain-level decision making process (e.g., what information to divulge or to acquire)
Aspects of the Recommendation Process
- Acquiring information about users’ preferences
- Modeling users’ preferences
- Provision of decision-relevant information
- Presentation and explanation of recommendations
- Adaptation to the interaction context
- Special characteristics of recommendation to groups
- ...
Aspects of Human Choice and Decision Making
- What people desire in a decision making process
- Roles of justification and argumentation in decision making
- Descriptive models of choice
- Heuristics and biases
- The nature of preferences
- Temporal aspects of decision making
- Forms of social influence
- Roles of emotion and mood
- Effects of learning from experience
- Negotiation in decision making
- Factors that influence decision making (e.g., culture, mood, time pressure ...)
- ...
Evaluation Criteria for Recommender Systems
- Decision quality
- Minimization of effort and stress
- Trust and confidence
- ...
Nature of the Research Contribution
- Novel functionality inspired by an understanding of human decision making
- Empirical results concerning decision making with recommender systems
- Innovation in research methodology (e.g., concerning ways of evaluating recommender systems or observing users’ decision making processes)
- ...
Special Issue Associate Editors
- Alexander Felfernig, Graz University of Technology, Austria (afelfern[at]ist[dot]tugraz[dot]at)
- Francesco Ricci, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy (francesco[dot]ricci[at]unibz[dot]it)
- Li Chen, Hong Kong Baptist University, China
- Giovanni Semeraro, Marco de Gemmis, and Pasquale Lops, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy
Important Dates
- By February 29th, 2012: Submission of manuscripts
- By May 29th, 2012: Notification about decisions on initial submissions
- By August 27th, 2012: Submission of revised manuscripts
- By October 26th, 2012: Notification about decisions on revised manuscripts
- By November 26th, 2012: Submission of manuscripts with final minor changes
- Starting December, 2012: Publication of the special issue on the TiiS website and subsequently in the ACM Digital Library and as a printed issue
Interaction with Smart Objects (Submissions Being Reviewed)
Aims and Scope
“Smart objects” refers to the rapidly growing trend of introducing computing capabilities into everyday objects and places. Well-known examples range from smart kitchen appliances and objects (smart coffee machines, smart knives and cutting boards, ...) to smart meeting rooms and even city-wide infrastructures. Smart objects are mostly fully functional on their own, but value is added by capabilities for communication and distributed reasoning.
While a lot of research has focused on the many technical challenges involved in implementing smart objects, far less research has been conducted on the question of how interaction of users with these objects can be improved, either by leveraging the intelligence in the objects or by other means. Smart objects raise unique challenges and opportunities for designing interaction with intelligent systems: coping with the mostly limited interaction capabilities, exploiting context information to provide more natural interaction, helping the user to understand the behavior and capabilities of the objects ....
This special issue will publish papers that address these issues from a variety of perspectives. The dimensions listed below indicate the range of work that is relevant to the special issue. In case of doubt about the relevance of your topic, please contact the guest editors.
Topic Dimensions
Paradigms for Interaction With Smart Objects
- Multimodal interaction
- Adaptive interaction
- Context-awareness
- Embodied and tangible interaction
- Interacting with ensembles of smart objects
- ...
Models for Human / Smart Object Interaction
- Conceptual models of interaction with smart objects
- Relevant psychological models
- Design principles and guidelines
- ...
Intelligibility of Smart Objects
- Self-explanatory smart objects
- Natural means for controlling smart objects
- Intelligibility of smart object ensembles and the Internet of Things
- ...
Empirical Studies of Human / Smart Object Interaction
- Novel evaluation techniques
- ...
Special Issue Associate Editors
- Max Mühlhäuser, Technische Universität Darmstadt
(contact: info[at]smart-objects[dot]org) - Kris Luyten, Hasselt University, Expertise Centre for Digital Media (EDM)
- Oliver Brdiczka, PARC
- Daniel Schreiber, Technische Universität Darmstadt
- Melanie Hartmann, AGT Group (R&D) GmbH
Important Dates
- By November 30th, 2011: Submission of manuscripts
- By March 14th, 2012: Notification about decisions on initial submissions
- By June 12th, 2012: Submission of revised manuscripts
- By August 13th, 2012: Notification about decisions on revised manuscripts
- By September 12th, 2012: Submission of manuscripts with final minor changes
- Starting October, 2012: Publication of the special issue on the TiiS website and subsequently in the ACM Digital Library and as a printed issue
Highlights of the Decade in Interactive Intelligent Systems (Revisions Being Reviewed / Accepted)
Aims and Scope
The closing of the first decade of the 21st century saw the launch of a top-tier journal devoted to research on all types of interactive intelligent systems: the ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems.
It is fitting that ACM TiiS should publish a special issue comprising papers that showcase some of the most important work of the past decade in this area.
The submissions to this special issue can concern any of the research areas that fall within the scope of the journal. Their difference from articles in other issues of the journal will lie in their unusual importance and impact as representatives of research from the first decade of this century: They will describe the sort of work that someone might refer to when explaining to a person from another field why intelligent interactive systems are an important area to pay attention to.
The research will probably have given rise to a number of publications during the past decade. The “Highlights ...” submission should add value to any such previous publications, for example ...
- ... by providing a comprehensive publication on the research, whereas previous publications have focused on particular aspects of the work;
- ... by reporting on results and insights that were not covered in previous publications;
- ... by including a discussion of the impact that the work has had since the original publications appeared.
Editors
Since this special issue is not restricted to a particular topic area, it will be edited by the editors-in-chief of ACM TiiS. Each submission will be managed by one of the associate editors of TiiS and reviewed by three experienced reviewers. Final decisions about inclusion of accepted papers in the “Highlights ...” special issue will be made by a jury comprising several TiiS associate editors who are not associated with any of the submissions.
Important Dates
- By May 31st, 2011: Submission of manuscripts
- By August 23rd, 2011: Notification about decisions on initial submissions
- By October 4th, 2011: Submission of revised manuscripts
- By November 15th, 2011: Notification about decisions on revised manuscripts
- By December 6th, 2011: Submission of manuscripts with final minor changes
- Starting January, 2012: Publication of the special issue on the TiiS website and subsequently in the ACM Digital Library and as a printed issue
Internet-Scale Human Problem Solving (In press)
Aims and Scope
Advances in social computing, collective intelligence, and a number of related areas have opened up new prospects for internet-scale human problem solving: technology-supported collaboration of widely distributed people who contribute in diverse roles to the solution of complex, multifaceted problems.
Many further interdisciplinary advances are required if the exploitation of these possibilities is to mature beyond its current state of infancy. Large-scale national and international initiatives are being built up to accelerate this maturation.
This special issue will contribute to progress in this area by publishing articles that ...
- report on some substantial achievement in a relevant area; and
- provide a well-founded analysis of the limits of the work done so far and of the next steps that need to be taken.
The list of topic dimensions below structures (nonexhaustively) the space of relevant topics. Articles will differ in the dimensions that they primarily focus on, but each article will make an identifiable contribution to the goal of internet-scale human problem solving.
Topic Dimensions
Support at the social level for ...
- enhancing awareness and communication
- allocating tasks to participants
- motivating participation
- integrating problem solving ideas
- testing hypotheses and solutions
- dealing with differences among participants
- ...
Support at the individual level for ...
- eliciting, recognizing, or learning ...
- data and judgments
- claims and arguments
- procedures
- relevant features of the context
- ...
- presenting results of problem-solving activities
- executing problem-solving actions
- ...
Ways of dealing with threats concerning ...
- privacy violations
- changes over time that impact the problem solving process
- system breakdowns
- ...
Research and design methods for ...
- generating and testing design ideas
- analyzing and evaluating the use of deployed systems
- generalizing research results
- leveraging existing scientific theories
- integrating contributions from different disciplines
- ...
Use of intelligent technology for ...
- knowledge capture
- learning of procedures
- sensemaking
- knowledge integration
- multiagent communication and coordination
- information retrieval
- natural language processing
- multimodal interaction
- visualization
- recommendation and decision support
- interface adaptation
- ...
Problem domains:
- Sustainability
- Healthcare and quality of life
- Safety and security
- Disaster response
- Production of goods and services
- Innovation in business
- Lifelong learning
- ...
Special Issue Associate Editors
- Fausto Giunchiglia, University of Trento
(contact: fausto[at]dit[dot]unitn[dot]it) - David Robertson, University of Edinburgh
Important Dates
- By June 1st, 2011: Submission of manuscripts
- By August 31st, 2011: Notification about decisions on initial submissions
- By November 30th, 2011: Submission of revised manuscripts
- By February 8th, 2012: Notification about decisions on revised manuscripts
- By March 2nd, 2012: Submission of manuscripts with final minor changes
- Starting April, 2012: Publication of the special issue on the TiiS website and subsequently in the ACM Digital Library and as a printed issue
Common Sense for Interactive Systems (Revisions Being Reviewed / Accepted)
Aims and Scope
Ideally, computers should be able to interact with users at a higher level than they do now, by understanding our goals, our problems, and the social procedures by which we live. But to do so, they must have access to a wealth of information about the world that we take for granted: common sense knowledge, or world knowledge.
Common sense knowledge can give rise to a richer user experience with a wide variety of interactive systems, from recommenders to storytelling platforms.
Since everyone possesses common sense knowledge, volunteers represent a significant source of common sense for computers. A well-designed intelligent user interface can guide a volunteer in a subjectively rewarding way to add the knowledge that is most needed.
Alternatively, world knowledge may be provided by a domain expert, or a game or story world may be created by an artist; in these cases, an interface must be designed to pass this knowledge from the expert to a common sense knowledge base.
This special issue aims to advance understanding of both sides of this symbiotic relationship: How can common sense enable computers to understand and serve their human users better? How can interfaces effectively support the elicitation of common sense knowledge?
Topics
- Using common sense to understand and predict users’ ...
- intentions, preferences,
- goals, plans,
- context, affect,
- beliefs, ...
- Exploiting common sense for ...
- adaptation of interfaces
- debugging
- interpreting data about users
- “sanity checking”
- robustly dealing with unusual situations
- ...
- Leveraging common sense in systems ...
- with goal-oriented interfaces
- for story understanding and generation
- for open-world gaming
- for recommendation
- for text understanding
- ...
- Design of intelligent interfaces for elicitation of common sense knowledge
...
- from experts
- from nonexpert users
- using games
- ...
Special Issue Associate Editors
- Henry Lieberman, MIT Media Lab, U.S.A.
- Catherine Havasi, MIT Media Lab, U.S.A.
(contact: havasi[at]media[dot]mit[dot]edu)
Important Dates
- By April 27th, 2011: Submission of manuscripts
- By July 27th, 2011: Notification about decisions on initial submissions
- By October 26th, 2011: Submission of revised manuscripts
- By January 11th, 2012: Notification about decisions on revised manuscripts
- By February 1st, 2012: Submission of manuscripts with final minor changes
- Starting March, 2012: Publication of the special issue on the TiiS website and subsequently in the ACM Digital Library and as a printed issue
Personalization and Persuasion (In press)
Aims and Scope
Personalized systems aim to enhance users’ experience by taking into account the individual user’s interests, needs, or other relevant properties. Systems based on persuasive technologies aim to modify users’ attitudes, motivation, intentions, or behavior through persuasion and social influence. The coupling of personalization and persuasion has great potential to enhance the impact of both types of technology.
Most persuasive applications employ a “one-size-fits-all” approach to persuasive delivery, but their impact can be increased if characteristics of users are taken into account (e.g., their preferences for particular forms of persuasion). Similarly, the acceptance and effectiveness of personalization (e.g., recommendation of interface adaptations) may be increased if it is supported with state-of-the-art persuasive technology.
This special issue invites submissions in the intersection of the areas of personalization and persuasion, which examine some combination of these two types of technology. Such combinations can be realized in a variety of domains and applications: from natural language techniques for personalized generation of persuasive content through persuasive explanations in recommender systems and e-commerce services to personalized and persuasive aspects of user interfaces and application functionalities.
The dimensions listed below indicate the range of work that is relevant to the special issue.
Topic Dimensions
Relationships Between Persuasion and Personalization
- Personalization in the service of persuasive technology
- Persuasive technology in the service of personalization
- ...
Ways in Which Personalization Can Enhance Persuasion
- Automatic matching of persuasive techniques to particular users
- Tailoring of persuasion to the user’s current context
- ...
Forms of Personalization That Can Be Enhanced With Persuasive
Technologies- User interface adaptation, recommendation, personalized content generation, personalized information presentation or visualization ...
Application Domains
- E-commerce, e-learning and intelligent learning environments, multimedia, user support, cultural heritage, health care, ...
Platforms
- Web-based systems, mobile systems, smart environments, pervasive/wearable computing , ...
Aspects of Personalized Persuasive Systems
- Advances in either personalization or persuasive technology required by their combination
- User experience: explanation, privacy, ethical issues, predictability, and user control
- Evaluations in research or practice
Special Issue Associate Editors
- Shlomo Berkovsky, CSIRO, Australia
(contact: Shlomo.Berkovsky[at]csiro[dot]au) - Jill Freyne, CSIRO, Australia
- Harri Oinas-Kukkonen, University of Oulu, Finland
Important Dates
- By February 15th, 2011: Submission of manuscripts
- By May 15th, 2011: Notification about decisions on initial submissions
- By August 15th, 2011: Submission of revised manuscripts
- By October 15th, 2011: Notification about decisions on revised manuscripts
- By November 1st, 2011: Submission of manuscripts with final minor changes
- Starting December, 2011: Publication of the special issue on the TiiS website and subsequently in the ACM Digital Library and as a printed issue
Eye Gaze in Intelligent Human-Machine Interaction (Published)
Aims and Scope
Partly because of the increasing availability of nonintrusive and high-performance eye tracking devices, recent years have seen a growing interest in incorporating human eye gaze in intelligent user interfaces. Eye gaze has been used as a pointing mechanism in direct manipulation interfaces, for example, to assist users with “locked-in syndrome”. It has also been used as a reflection of information needs in web search and as a basis for tailoring information presentation. Detection of joint attention as indicated by eye gaze has been used to facilitate computer-supported human-human communication. In conversational interfaces, eye gaze has been used to improve language understanding and intention recognition. On the output side, eye gaze has been incorporated into the multimodal behavior of embodied conversational agents. Recent work on human-robot interaction has explored eye gaze in incremental language processing, visual scene processing, and conversation engagement and grounding.
This special issue will report on state-of-the-art computational models, systems, and studies that concern eye gaze in intelligent and natural human-machine communication. The nonexhaustive list of topics below indicates the range of appropriate topics; in case of doubt, please contact the guest editors.
Papers that focus mainly on eye tracking hardware and software as such will be relevant (only) if they make it clear how the advances reported open up new possibilities for the use of eye gaze in at least one of the ways listed above.
Topics
- Empirical studies of eye gaze in human-human communication that provide new insight into the role of eye gaze and suggest implications for the use of eye gaze in intelligent systems. Examples include new empirical findings concerning eye gaze in human language processing, in human-vision processing, and in conversation management.
- Algorithms and systems that incorporate eye gaze for human-computer interaction and human-robot interaction. Examples include gaze-based feedback to information systems; gaze-based attention modeling; exploiting gaze in automated language processing; and controlling the gaze behavior of embodied conversational agents or robots to enable grounding, turn-taking, and engagement.
- Applications that demonstrate the value of incorporating eye gaze in practical systems to enable intelligent human-machine communication.
Special Issue Associate Editors
- Elisabeth André, University of Augsburg, Germany
(contact: andre[at]informatik[dot]uni-augsburg.de)
- Joyce Chai, Michigan State University, USA
Important Dates
- By December 15th, 2010: Submission of manuscripts
- By March 23rd, 2011: Notification about decisions on initial submissions
- By June 23rd, 2011: Submission of revised manuscripts
- By August 25th, 2011: Notification about decisions on revised manuscripts
- By September 15th, 2011: Submission of manuscripts with final minor changes
- Starting October, 2011: Publication of the special issue on the TiiS website and subsequently in the ACM Digital Library and as a printed issue
Affective Interaction in Natural Environments (Published)
Aims and Scope
A vital requirement for social robots, virtual agents, and human-centered multimodal interfaces is the ability to infer the affective and mental states of humans and provide appropriate, timely output during sustained social interactions.
Examples include ensuring that the user is interested in maintaining the interaction or providing suitable empathic responses through the display of facial expressions, gesture, or generation of speech.
This special issue will cover computational techniques for the recognition and interpretation of human multimodal verbal and nonverbal behavior, models of mentalizing and empathizing for interaction, and multimedia techniques for the synthesis of believable social behavior supporting human-agent and human-robot interaction.
A key aim of the special issue is the identification and investigation of important open issues in real-time, affect-aware applications “in the wild” and especially in embodied interaction, i.e., with robots and embodied conversational agents. We encourage the submission of studies that provide new insights into the use of multimodal and multimedia techniques for enabling interaction between humans, robots, and virtual agents in naturalistic settings.
The special issue especially welcomes submission of contributions that focus on innovative intelligent technology and the way it is successfully integrated into the interaction cycle between users and virtual agents and robots, in line with the binocular view encouraged by TiiS.
Submissions can come from a variety of research areas, including naturalistic human-robot and human-computer interaction and multimedia human-computer interaction. The categories below cover most of the relevant topics, but they are not exhaustive. In case of doubt about the relevance of your topic, please contact the guest editors.
Topics
Focus on Recognition
- Multimodal human affect and social behavior recognition, including:
- Facial expressions
- Body language
- Speech
- Physiological signals
- Other modalities
- Cognitive and affective “mentalizing”
- Recognition of human behavior for implicit tagging
Focus on Generation
- Multimedia expression generation in robots and virtual agents, including:
- Gaze
- Gestures
- Facial expressions
- Speech
- Other modalities
Focus on Interaction
- Emotion and cognitive state representation
- Perception-action loops in agents/robots
- Visual attention / user engagement with robots and embodied conversational agents
- Social context-awareness and adaptation
- Applications of methods and results in the above areas to interactive games, robots, and virtual agents
Databases
- Multimodal corpora for training recognition systems
- Multimodal corpora for modeling the behavior of agents and robots
Special Issue Associate Editors
- Ginevra Castellano, Queen Mary University of London, UK
(contact: ginevra[at]dcs[dot]qmul[dot]ac[dot]uk)
- Kostas Karpouzis, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
- Jean-Claude Martin, LIMSI-CNRS, France
- Louis-Philippe Morency, University of Southern California, USA
- Christopher Peters, Coventry University, UK
- Laurel Riek, University of Cambridge, UK
Important Dates
- By December 6th, 2010: Submission of manuscripts
- By March 18th, 2011: Notification about decisions on initial submissions
- By June 17th, 2011: Submission of revised manuscripts
- By September 2nd, 2011: Notification about decisions on revised manuscripts
- By September 23rd, 2011: Submission of manuscripts with final minor changes
- Starting October, 2011: Publication of the special issue on the TiiS website and subsequently in the ACM Digital Library and as a printed issue