CfP: Special Issue - Enculturating Human Computer Interaction (AI & Society)

Special Issue: Enculturating Human Computer Interaction, Journal of AI & Society

Deadline for submissions: 30 September 2008


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We are living in a globalized world but local or cultural identities strongly influence our patterns of behavior and our interpretation of behavior in others by establishing norms and values. Nevertheless, current interfaces seldom reflect such cultural 'mental programs', as Hofstede has termed this effect. Thus, users are forced to adapt their way of interaction and interpretation to a given (most of the time western) perspective. Instead it would be much more reasonable to allow eg for culturally tailored presentation of information.

Although there is no principled approach yet to challenge the importance of cultural patterns in human-computer interaction, there is a number of promising results from a variety of research projects around the world that have started to integrate cultural aspects in the interaction. These range from artistic work over web design to CSCW support tools and training applications with conversational virtual characters. Bringing together the leading reseachers from these emerging research streams in this special issue will further discussion and contribute to establishing a new research area.

The special issue will be centered around three main research challenges:

1. Models and Theory: Cultural norms and values penetrate all our interactions by giving us heuristics how to behave and how to interpret verbal and nonverbal behaviors. To make such a notion like culture available for computation, we need theories of culture that precisely describe its effects on interaction allowing for building parametrized models.
2. Empirical data on cultural/cross-cultural interaction: To realize technical systems that take cultural influences on behavior and perception into account, precise data analysis on how this influence manifests itself is necessary. Because this information is often scattered throughout the literature, it is necessary to provide (meta-)analyses of specific behaviors. Additionally, there is a need for large databases of comparable multimodal corpora from different cultures to assess variations in a principled way. From a developers point of view, data on cultural differences in interacting with interfaces and devices is necessary.
3. Systems and Applications: Having identified cultural influences on verbal/nonverbal interaction behaviors, it remains to be shown how this can be applied to the development of human-computer interfaces, for instance in dynamically tailoring web designs to the user's cultural preferences for information presentation, or in ASR systems taking the user's culture-specific verbal behavior into account, or in virtual characters in games and training applications reflecting the users' culturally determined nonverbal behavior patterns. Moreover, the effect of systems taking cultural variables into account has to be evaluated to provide a sound empirical foundation for further developments.

Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Models and theories of enculturated interfaces
- Design guidelines for enculturated interfaces
- Field studies of intercultural interaction
- Standardization issues on resources and tools for enculturated HCI such as multilingual/multi-cultural comparative corpus, verbal/nonverbal behaviors annotation scheme
- Language processing for enculturated interfaces/multilingual NLP
- Multimodal processing for enculturated interfaces
- Culture adaptive interaction techniques focuing e.g. on conversational, mobile, pervasive, or web-based interactions
- Computer supported intercultural collaboration
- Web technologies for enculturated HCI
- Ambient technologies for enculturated HCI
- Prototypes of enculturated systems
- Evaluation case studies/Evaluation guidelines for enculturated systems

Guest Editors
Matthias Rehm, Elisabeth André, University of Augsburg
Yukiko Nakano, Seikei University, Tokyo
Toyoaki Nishida, Kyoto University

Contact:
Matthias Rehm, rehm AT informatik.uni-augsburg.de
Yukiko Nakano, y.nakano AT st.seikei.ac.jp

Associated Link: Call for Papers: Enculturating Human Computer Interaction

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