#EmpathicCHI — A CHI2021 workshop you should not miss
Empathic interactions in automated vehicles
CHI is the top 1 conference on human-computer interaction out there (see Google Scholar rankings here). It is organised by ACM SIGCHI (their blog is also on Medium!). This year, the conference should have taken place in Japan, but due to the current situation will finally happen online (easier to join for anyone, let’s be positive ;)).
The good news is we are fortunate and honoured to organise a workshop there this year, together with members of the University of Messina in Italy, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in the Netherlands, CNRS-SAMOVAR in France, the HumanTech Institute from HES-SO, Switzerland, and also EmpathicLabs.
Introducing #EmpathicCHI
Automation in driving will change the role of the drivers from actor to passive supervisor. Although the vehicle will be responsible for driving manoeuvres, drivers will need to rely on automation and understand its decisions to establish a trusting relationship between them and the vehicle. Progress has been made in conversational agents and affective machines recently. Moreover, it seems to be promising in this establishment of trust between humans and machines. We believe it is essential to investigate the use of emotional conversational agents in the automotive context to build a solid relationship between the driver and the vehicle.
In this workshop, we aim at gathering researchers and industry practitioners from different fields of Human-Computer Interaction, Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Understanding and Psychology to brainstorm about affective machines, empathy and conversational agent with a particular focus on human-vehicle interaction. Questions like “What would be the specificities of a multimodal and empathic agent in a car?”, “How the agent could make the driver aware of the situation?” and “How to measure the trust between the user and the autonomous vehicle?” will be addressed in this workshop.
Content of the workshop
During the workshop, the main focus will be made on two points: Brainstorming on driving scenarios, and Creativity Session. The interactions will be rich (thanks to your participation as well of course!) and productive in order to discover and design new interactions in the different scenarios. Here are some points that will be discussed:
- Identification of important information that might (or should) be provided to drivers
- Identification of affective conversational agents specifications in automotive context
- Explore and design with participants empathic conversational agents in order to convey information defined above
As you’ve probably understood by now, here are the key topics of the workshop. And you might be interested if you work in one or more of these domains:
Affective Computing • Empathic Interactions • Multimodal Interactions • Driver-Vehicle Interactions • Conversational Agents • Virtual Coaches • HCI
Join us! :)
Useful information
Important points you need to know if you’re interested:
- Workshop date: Friday May 7th, 2021, 15:00 CEST
- Location: online (more info later)
- Registration process: directly on CHI website, use the code “AccessW16” to register to this workshop!
- Deadline for registration: April 13, 2021 (early bird March 16)
- Workshop website: https://sites.google.com/view/empathic-cars-workshop
- Contact email of the organisation team: empathic.chi21@gmail.com
We look forward to see you there. Don’t hesitate to spread the word to your colleagues or labs that work in these domains. Thanks a lot, and all the best!
PS: use #empathicChi hashtag on Twitter if you wanna discuss or follow the event live, and follow @empathiclabs 🐦
