CONNECT

A Workshop on Connecting Interdisciplinary Research on Connections With and Through Technology

@ 24^th ACM International conference on Intelligent virtual agents (IVA) 2024, Sept 19^th

The human need to belong is a fundamental motivation to form and maintain strong, stable interpersonal relationships and to frequently interact in a positive way within these relationships. To fulfill this need, different kinds of technologies come into use. On the one hand, there are technologies with which people directly interact with in a social way. On the other hand, there are technologies that offer means to interact with another person. While the technologies and their potential applications are rapidly increasing, research is often fragmented and lagging behind. Particularly due to the intersection of human and technology, interdisciplinary research is needed to develop methods and standards with which new “connectivity technologies” can be designed and their impact and acceptance be measured. Against this background, the aim of this workshop is to provide a platform for researchers from different fields to connect and exchange ideas as well as possibilities for future research on technologies that offer or mediate social connections.

Call for Papers

The organizers are calling for papers that include but are not limited to the following topics:

Interactive technologies and systems such as Socially Interactive Agents (embodied or not like robots or virtual agents), voice assistants, and chatbots
Technologies and applications that connect individuals that are apart
Empirical studies on Computer-Mediated Communication
Empirical studies on Human-Computer Interaction
New concepts for connecting individuals with or through technology
Ethical considerations regarding the role of technologies and connectivity

Submission

Workshop paper submission deadline: ~~July 19, 2024~~ July 28, 2024
Notifications: August 16, 2024
Deadline for Camera ready version: September 06, 2024
Workshop: September 19, 2024

Submission format: max 6 pages (excluded references).

Please submit your contribution per e-mail to aike.horstmann@uni-due.de as PDF, using the predefined 2-column CEUR template (an Overleaf page for LaTeX users is also available).

The submitted contribution must be written in English and do not need to be anonymized (single-blind review process). A panel of experts from relevant fileds will be asked to review the contributions, selecting the most relevant, novel, original and high-quality ones to be included in the workshop program. Authors of accepted submissions will be invited to give an oral presentation of their work. The accepted papers will be published in the workshop’s proceedings on CEUR Workshop Proceedings (http://ceur-ws.org/).

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.

Workshop Program

9:00-9:15	Welcome and Onboarding
9:15-10:15	Paper Presentations: 10 min per paper (7 min talk + 3 min Q&A) Chances and challenges of connectivity technologies for vulnerable groups: results of a focus group study – Siewert et al. Artificial Social Influence: Rapport-Building, LLM-Based Embodied Conversational Agents for Health Coaching – Lim et al. Design and Real-World Data Adaptation of Fuzzy Logic for Naturalistic Feedback from a Social Robot in a SAR-VR System for Apathy Intervention in Older Adults – Migovich & Sarkar Empathic AI for Autism: Potential and Pitfalls of Empathic Social Chatbots in Addressing Loneliness – Hollis & McGown Networks of lifelines – Designing digital connectivity for depressed users – Kirschall & Guhlemann Comparing Automatic metrics with Human Perceptions: the Ethical Challenges of Evaluating the Human-likeness of Chatbots – Chen et al.
10:15-10:45	Brief Introductions & Group Composition
10:45-11:00	Coffee Break
11:00-12:10	Connecting: Exchange and Networking in Small Groups
12:10-12:30	Presentation of Group Results
from 12:30	Lunch and Further Networking

Program Committee Members

Uwe Altmann, Medical School Berlin, Berlin
Lara Chehayeb, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Saarbrücken, Germany
Hannah Fischer, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Berlin, Germany
Elisabeth Ganal, Würzburg University, Würzburg, Germany
Marc Hassenzahl, University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany
Mirella Hladký, Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany
Nicole Krämer, University of Duisburg-Essen, Duisburg, Germany
Gale Lucas, University of Southern California/Institute for Creative Technologies, Los Angeles, USA
Fabrizio Nunnari, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Saarbrücken, Germany
Catherine Pelachaud, ISIR (CNRS), Paris, France
Astrid Rosenthal-von der Pütten, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany
Kinga Schumacher, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Berlin, Germany
Jessica Szczuka, University of Duisburg-Essen, Duisburg, Germany
Ersilia Vallefuoco, University of Trento, Trento, Italy
Jana Volkert, Ulm University, Ulm, Germany
Christiane Wenhart, University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany
Janet Wessler, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Saarbrücken, Germany
Massimo Zancanaro, University of Trento, Trento, Italy

Participation

This workshop is open to everyone! We encourage not only the presenters to participate in the workshop, but also all others that are interested in this topic. We highly appreciate every participant’s point of view.

Organizers

Aike Horstmann is a postdoc at the Social Psychology: Media and Communication group at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. She studied Applied Cognitive and Media Science at the University of Duisburg-Essen, followed by her doctoral studies in the field of human-robot/virtual agent-interaction with a focus on humans’ perceptions of artificial entities. She received her PhD in early 2021 and started as a senior research associate and interdisciplinary project coordinator in the commercial sector. Since 2022, she continues to conduct research in the field of human-machine interaction, particularly on relationships and communication with as well as understanding of intelligent systems and technology-mediated connectedness, particularly on technology-mediated connectedness within the BMBF-funded project VEREINT.
E-mail: aike.horstmann@uni-due.de

Tanja Schneeberger is a Senior Researcher in the Affective Computing group at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence in Berlin, Germany. She received her PhD in psychology in 2023. Her research focuses on affective reactions in human-computer interaction and how relationships are built between users and machines, especially focusing on Socially Interactive Agents. She has been involved in the organization of several workshops: OpenDS User Convention @AutomotiveUI 2015, Func-E @ACII 2021, SUM @Mensch und Computer 2023.
E-mail: tanja.schneeberger@dfki.de

Patrick Gebhard is the head of the Affective Computing Group at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence in Saarbrücken, Germany. His research focuses on human emotional intelligence and its employment for human-computer interaction. He was involved in the organization of several international conferences and workshops, among others submission chair of the IVA 2019 conference, workshop co-chair of the Func-E workshop (ACII 2021), Workshop on Conversational Interruptions in Human-Agent Interactions (WCIHAI 2017), IUI 2010 workshop and conference co-chair, IUI 2009 workshop and demo co-chair.

This workshop is funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) within the VEREINT project (Funding Code 16SV9109) and the UBIDENZ project (Funding Code 13GW0568D).