LIBM'08

First International Workshop on Laughter in Interaction and Body Movement

Asahikawa Convention Bureau, Hokkaido, Japan, June 10, 2008

Convention Venue: Asahikawa Tokiwa Citizens Hall 3F, Room 301

in conjunction with JSAI2008: the 22nd National Meeting of The Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence.

• Invited Talk I: Phillip Glenn (Professor and Interim Chair, Emerson College)
• Invited Talk II: Yutaka Tani (Professor Emeritus, Kyoto University)

** Program is finally available here ! **

Feel free to contact the organizers for any questions regarding this workshop.

Laughter takes a great role in leading a social life for humans. It not only comes out as just a physiological phenomenon, but is ingeniously designed and created as a resource for constructing a social relationship or bringing about smooth communication. Social laughter cannot be created by a single person but by a collaborative activity among participants in a conversation. Furthermore, configuration and body movements of the participants also comprise the essential factors of laughter besides linguistic ones.

Such an emotive factor as laughter thus cannot be overlooked when we establish a smooth social relationship with computers. However, though human-computer interaction (HCI) has recently become familiar in everyday life, it is on rather limited occasions that HCI makes positive use of laughter.

This workshop focuses attention on the phenomenon of laughter in interactions and body movements of participants. In particular, it focuses on what physical/cognitive factors and conditions socially enact laughing situations or moments, and on how laughter is perceived and utilized as a resource for social interaction by participants. Therefore, this workshop does not treat the laughter itself, but rather aims at clarifying the structure of the social or communicative environment surrounding laughter, which would become the basis for constructing socially smooth and natural HCI.

We thus encourage the submission of papers that address any theme related to the above. Moreover, the papers on the modeling of how to realize natural body movements of a robot or an embodied conversational agent in social interaction with humans are also welcomed.

According to the scope of this workshop above, topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• laughter and smile in conversation
• realizing body movements of a natural and emotive robot/agent
• pragmatic meaning and effects of laughter
• organization of laughter in interaction and communication
• laughter recognition for emotive computing
• humor recognition/realization in multi-modal communication
• laughter-synchronizing in multi-party conversation
• stand-up comedy as 'open communication'
• creating/utilizing humor in human-computer interaction
• body movements of laughmakers or comedians
• humorous interaction in stand-up comedy/team comedy
• what to become a trigger of waves of laughter in audiences

First paper submission (extended): April 1, 2008

Camera-ready submission (extended): April 23, 2008 May 19, 2008

Workshop date: June 10, 2008

Authors are invited to submit original papers that have neither been published nor submitted for publication elsewhere, including web publication. Papers should be submitted in PDF. Submissions must conform to the Springer's format and should be 4-6 pages (including all text, figures, references and appendices).

Once accepted, papers may be revised and extended to 8 pages in preparation for publication in the post-proceedings as selected papers as Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI), Springer.

Papers should be submitted by email to libm08@mls.teu.ac.jp.

WORKSHOP CHAIR:
Hitoshi Iida (Tokyo University of Technology, Japan)

PROGRAM CHAIRS:
Masashi Okamoto (Tokyo University of Technology, Japan)
Katsuya Takanashi (Kyoto University, Japan)

PROGRAM COMMITTEE (Partial List):
Mayumi Bono (UCLA, USA / JSPS, Japan)
Yasuharu Den (Chiba University, Japan)
Mika Enomoto (Tokyo University of Technology, Japan)
Hiromichi Hosoma (The University of Shiga Prefecture, Japan)
Masato Ohba (Tokyo University of Technology, Japan)
Mamiko Sakata (Doshisha University, Japan)

If you have any questions, contact us at libm08@mls.teu.ac.jp.