ESSEM 2019

4th International Workshop on

Emotion and Sentiment in Social and Expressive Media:
Media and Arts for Inclusive, Fair and Reflective Societies
ESSEM@ACII 2019

Co-located with ACII 2019, the 8th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction,
Cambridge, United Kingdom, Semptember 3, 2019
University of Cambridge

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The advent of social media has brought about new paradigms of interaction where the subjective dimension moves to the foreground, opening the way to the emergence of an affective component within a dynamic corpus of digitized contents created and enriched by the users. In parallel, in the digital age, artistic creation and self-expression are more and more intertwined with a social dimension, ranging from co-creation paradigms to interactive art forms. This advocates new techniques for automatic processing of the affective and subjective information conveyed, as a basis for developing applications that specifically address the role of sentiment and emotions in social and expressive media, with a focus on education, health, cultural heritage, artistic expression, and entertainment.

The 4th edition of ESSEM is especially devoted to the discussion of implications of using social and expressive media for supporting an inclusive, fair and reflective society. In particular, we are interested in the reflection brought about by media and arts, as forms of emotional communication, about the changes and conflicts occurring in society: models and methods to detect, measure and study social phenomena in media though affect; artistic expression as a way to reverberate collective sentiment and promote awareness of ongoing transformations. Therefore, a major focus will be given to models and applications that can impact on monitoring, analyzing inequalities and on supporting the implementation of countermeasures to foster inclusion and fairness. Inequalities are indeed an increasingly spreading phenomena in combination with the pervasivity of social media, which may play a key role with respect to exclusion of youngers (cyberbullying), women (misogyny), and immigrants (hate speech), just to cite few related challenges for the ESSEM community.