Call for papers

The 2nd International workshop SOCIALIZE aims to bring together all those interested in the development of interactive techniques that may contribute to foster the social and cultural inclusion of a broad range of users. More specifically, we intend to attract research that takes into account the interaction peculiarities typical of different realities, with a focus on disadvantaged and at-risk categories (e.g., refugees and migrants) and vulnerable groups (e.g., children, elderly, autistic and disabled people). Among others, we are also interested in human-robot interaction techniques aimed at the development of social robots, that is, autonomous robots that interact with people by engaging in social-affective behaviors, abilities, and rules related to their collaborative role.

The main topics of the workshop are (but not limited to):

* Multi-cultural system design;

* Empirical studies on the impact of culture on systems;

* Cultural and social influence in online learning platforms (e.g., MOOC);

* Cultural and social influence in recommender systems;

* Cultural and social aspects as contextual factors;

* Inclusive recommender systems;

* Methods for automatic assessment of social and cultural background from social media;

* Strategies for adapting systems to groups of users with different backgrounds;

* Cultural and social situation awareness;

* Cross-cultural analyses of trust in systems;

* Human-robot adaptation for cross-cultural users, including under-represented groups;

* Personalized Human-Robot Interaction (HRI);

* Adaptation strategies for social HRI;

* Machine learning for social robots;

* Emotion and personality detection in social HRI;

* Social robots as conversational recommender systems;

* Social robots in the real world;

* Social assistive robots (e.g., for elderly people or children with autism spectrum disorder);

* Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on cultural and social inclusion;

* Algorithmic bias detection and mitigation for marginalized groups;

 

Researchers and practitioners in academia or industry are encouraged to submit original manuscripts relevant to the audience of the workshop. Papers must comply with the standard ACM SIGCHI Paper Format (see http://iui.acm.org/2021/call_for_papers.html).

The contributions can be: Full papers (6 pages excluding references) and Short papers (4 pages excluding references), including substantial work-in-progress, perspective papers, and lessons learned; and Challenge, Position, and Demo papers (2 pages excluding references), describing research challenges in theory or practice, defining new promising research directions, and demonstrating innovative software prototypes.

Manuscripts must be submitted via Easychair (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=socialize2022) by January 3rd, 2022. All submissions will undergo a peer-review process. Reviewers will consider originality, significace, technical soundness, clarinty, and relevance to the workshop’s topics. The reviewing process will be double-blind.

At least one author of each accepted position paper must register for and (virtually) attend the workshop. Accepted contributions will be published in a joint volume of dedicated workshop proceedings.