1st Workshop on Multimodal Virtual Agents for Mental Health and wellbeing – A new world with foundation models

1st Workshop on Multimodal Virtual Agents for Mental Health and wellbeing – A new world with foundation models

Unfortunately, the workshop will not be taking place this year! Instead it might be presented at IVA 2024.

Scope

Every day, hundreds of millions of people go to bed anxious, depressed, unhappy, with no peace of mind of knowing what to do tomorrow to make their lives better. Human-like conversational AI agents with affect sensing capabilities can revolutionise digital mental health and wellbeing solutions. Multimodal agents that can interact through face, voice and natural language are essential to mimic human-human-like interactions. Such agents with multimodal affective interactions have the potential to enable novel approaches to assess mental health conditions such as clinical depression, anxiety, etc.
With the advent of vision-language Foundation models such as GPT and DALL.E in the recent years, the way humans interact with AI has started changing dramatically. Building on these developments in vision and language, efforts to build Foundation Models for face and voice data are underway. The emerging properties of such Foundation models can create new opportunities in developing more engaging human-AI interactions coupled with affect sensing capabilities. Coupled with large language foundation models, it may well for the first time make the long-standing goal of truly interactive virtual agents possible. This could in turn have a great impact on the way mental health conditions are assessed and treated in digital solutions. This workshop calls for papers that explore applications of face, voice, and language Foundation Models in building mental health applications.

Call for Papers

The organisers are calling for papers on the following topics:

  • Recognition of mental health conditions from face and voice
  • Improving delivery of mental health treatment using empathetic virtual agents
  • Providing mental health advise using virtual agents
  • Reports of real-world deployment of virtual agents
  • Ethical issues of virtual agents for mental health

Submission Policy

In submitting a manuscript to this workshop, the authors acknowledge that no paper substantially similar in content has been submitted to another conference or workshop. Manuscripts should follow the Springer LNCS paper format. Authors should submit papers as a PDF file.
Reviewing is double blind. Reviewing will be by members of the program committee. Each paper will receive at least two reviews. Acceptance will be based on relevance to the workshop, novelty, and technical quality.

Please submit your paper contributions through EasyChair.

Organisers

Prof Michel Valstar, University of Nottingham/BlueSkeye AI
Dr Mani Tellamekala, BlueSkeye AI
Dr Joy Egede, University of Nottingham
Dr Nicholas Cummins, King’s College London

Important dates

  • Wed 19 July 2023 – Submission deadline 
  • Mon 31 July 2023 – Notification of acceptance 
  • Tue 15 Aug 2023 – ‘Camera ready’ version deadline 
  • Tue 19 Sept 2023 – Workshop day of Conference

For all inquiries, please contact Mani Tellamekala (mani@blueskeye.com), or Joy Egede (joy.egede@nottingham.ac.uk).