About
Intelligent systems are increasingly envisioned to support humans in diverse social settings, with examples ranging from intelligent tutoring applications to social robots in elderly care. Essential components for such systems to be successful are their abilities to (1) sufficiently estimate how users think and feel during interactions, in addition to (2) displaying appropriate behavior in response to these estimates. While Affective Computing (AC) research has tackled many technical aspects of these challenges, it has thus far left a fundamental barrier to progress largely unaddressed: the highly context-sensitive nature of human cognitive-affective processing. For example, how we express our feelings in terms of behavioral signals may depend strongly on the social setting in which we are currently embedded (e.g., the behavior of others present and the social norms and values these adhere to).
With this workshop, we aim to provide an interdisciplinary platform for discussing research on considering Social Context in Affective Computing systems. We strive to provide a platform to stimulate joint research projects, exchange methods, and a critical discussion of current and future efforts.
The ASOCA workshop is a satellite event of the 12th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII 2023) taking place on 10 September 2023 at the MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, MA (USA).
In summary, topics of interest for the workshop include (but are not limited to) empirical and theoretical work (incl. position papers) on:
- Context-sensitive Modelling of cognitive-affective states in social situations from behavioral (e.g., facial expressions or gestures) and physiological signals (e.g., EEG, EDA, EMG, HR)..
- Modeling internal user states during social interactions (e.g., emotions in group settings).
- Personalization and Context-sensitivity in Human-robot (e.g., social robotics) and Human-computer interaction.
- Personalization and context-sensitivity in social interactions with intelligent systems (e.g., conversational interactions with robots or virtual agents)
- Context-sensitive adaptation to cognitive-affective user states (e.g., detecting and integrating features of social context).
- Multi-modal datasets for modeling emotional and cognitive processes in social contexts (especially corpora spanning multiple different contextual settings).
- Simulations of contextual influences on cognitive-affective processing or behavior in social interactions.
Important Dates
All deadlines are at the end of the day in the GMT-12 timezone.
Submission Deadline: | 14 April, 2023 |
Acceptance Notifications: | 2 June, 2023 |
Camera-ready Deadline: | 1 August, 2023 |
Workshop date: | 10 September, 2023 |
Submission
We invite submissions of the following types for presentation at the workshop:
- Full Papers: max. 8 pages (7 pages + 1 page for references)
- Short Papers: max. 5 pages (4 pages + 1 page for references)
Submissions should be double-blind, i.e., anonymous, and should follow the official submission guidelines from ACII2023.
Each paper will be sent to at least two expert reviewers and will have one of the organizers assigned as editor.
Accepted submissions will be made available on the workshop proceedings of ACII 2023. At least one author must register for the workshop and one conference day.
Papers can be submitted via ACII’s EasyChair platform (choose track “Workshop: Addressing Social Context in Affective Computing”).
Program
T.B.A.
Invited Speakers

Giovanna Varni
University of Trento
Giovanna Varni is an Associate Professor at Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science (DISI), University of Trento, Italy. She is an interdisciplinary researcher mainly investigating on Social Signal Processing (SSP), Affective Computing (AC) and Human Computer Interaction (HCI). She was involved in several EU FP7-FP6 projects, and she was PI of the national French project ANR JCJC GRACE (2019-2022) on the automated analysis of cohesion in small groups of humans. She contributes regularly to organizational roles in international conferences and workshops relevant for her specific research area such as ACII and ICMI, for which she also serves as a Program Committee member.

Daniel Balliet
Free University Amsterdam
Daniel Balliet’s research focuses on understanding Human Cooperation. He applies experiments, field studies, and meta-analysis to test evolutionary and psychological theories of cooperation. His work addresses issues related to (a) how people think about their interdependence in social interactions, (b) how people condition their cooperation to acquire direct and indirect benefits, and (c) understanding cross-societal variation in cooperation. He is the recipient of an ERC Starting Grant (2015-2020) and an ERC Consolidator Grant (2020-2025).
Organizing Committee

Bernd Dudzik
Delft University of Technology

Tiffany Matej Hrkalovic
VU Amsterdam & Delft University of Technology

Joost Broekens
Leiden University

Dirk Heylen
University of Twente

Zakia Hammal
Carnegie Mellon University
Program Committee
- Apostolos Kalatzis (Montana State University)
- Chirag Raman (Delft University of Technology)
- Fabiola Diana (University of Leiden)
- Francisca Pessanha (University of Utrecht)
- Kim Baraka (VU Amsterdam)
- Maria Tsfasman (Delft University of Technology)
- Morita Tarvirdians (Delft University of Technology)