Motivation

Affective computing is the study and development of systems and devices that can recognize, interpret, process, and simulate human affects, i.e. the experience of feelings or emotions. Over the past decade, research has shown the impact of affective states on work performance and on team collaboration. This also applies for software engineering that involves people in a broad range of activities, where personality traits, moods, and emotions play a crucial role. For successful software engineering projects, stakeholders often need to experience positive affect (such as trust, appreciation, positive feelings associated to rewarding, etc.), to agree on display rules for emotions and moods, and to hold mutual commitment to the project goals. Recently, researchers started to study the role of affective computing and affective states in software engineering. Contributions on this topic are currently being presented and discussed in diverse conferences and workshops due to a lack of a dedicated forum. This workshop aims at creating an international, sustainable forum for researchers and practitioners interested in the role of affect in software engineering to meet, present, and discuss their work-in-progress. High-quality contributions about empirical studies, theoretical models, as well as tools for supporting emotion awareness in software engineering are invited to the workshop, both from academia and industry.

Topics

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Impact of affective states (emotions, moods, attitudes, personality traits) on individual and group performance, commitment and collaboration in software engineering
  • The role of affect in the social programmer ecosystem
  • Affective computing as a new method for empirical software engineering: exploiting affective computing methods and techniques to support empirical research in software engineering
  • Leveraging stakeholders’ affective feedback to improve software, tools, and processes (e.g., capturing and analysis of sentiment of users and community feedback, aspect-based sentiment analysis of product reviews, etc.)
  • Design, development, and evaluation of frameworks and tools for supporting emotion awareness in software engineering
  • Ethnographic approaches to affect monitoring in the workplace of software projects
  • Psychology of programming and affective states modeling (e.g., defining/adapting psychological model of affect to software engineering, understanding the trigger behind positive and negative emotions during developers’ activities, coarse vs. fine-grained emotion modeling, etc.)
  • Affective state detection from multimodal analysis of spontaneous communicative behavior such as natural language processing, analysis of body posture and gesture, speech analysis, conversational analysis during meetings, use of biometric measurements, reliable signal collection and processing
  • Affect sensing from communication artifact (e.g., message boards, issue tracking, social media): techniques and tools for extracting and summarizing emotions in communication
  • Methodologies for large-scale emotion mining
  • The interplay between affective expression and exogenous and endogenous workplace factors (such as physical location of the work team, the organizational hierarchy, the adopted technologies, etc.)
  • Emotion awareness in requirements engineering, software design, and software management
  • Emotion awareness in software design philosophies, development practices, and tools
  • Emotion awareness in cross-cultural teams in global software development
  • Mutual emotion-awareness: affect display rule in the workplace and how emotion display enhances/impairs trust, appreciation, cooperation, positive outcomes of engineering activities
  • Reusable software frameworks, APIs, and patterns for designing and maintaining affect-aware systems

Types of Contributions

We invite three kinds of submissions:

  • Full papers (6 pages) describing emotion awareness challenges, needs, novel approaches, and frameworks. New approaches must be evaluated with users in this category. Empirical evaluation papers and industrial experience reports are also welcome.
  • Short position papers (3-4 pages) describing a new idea or work in progress.
  • Posters, data showcase and demo papers (1-2 pages) summarizing a research project, tool, technique or datasets.

All papers must conform, at time of submission, to the ICSE formatting guidelines for Technical Research. All submissions must be in English.

Papers must be submitted electronically, in PDF format. Submissions should be made at the following website:   https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=semotion16

Papers will be evaluated based on their originality, relevance to the workshop, and their potential for discussion. The papers with the best reviews will be accepted to be presented and discussed in the workshop. Accepted papers will be published as an ICSE 2016 Workshop Proceedings in the ACM and IEEE Digital Libraries and 
will be distributed to the workshop participants. The official publication date of the workshop proceedings is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of ICSE 2016. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

It is the desire of the organizers that discussion of research at the workshop does not preclude publication of closely related material at conferences or journals. Therefore, authors of accepted papers will be able to choose whether to include their papers in the workshop proceedings.

Important Dates

Paper submissions due: January 22, 2016 – Now January 29, 2016
Notification to authors: February 19, 2016
Camera-ready copies due: February 26, 2016
Workshop: May 17, 2016

Organizers

Program Committee

  • Raian Ali, Bournemouth University, UK
  • Andrew Begel, Microsoft Research, USA
  • Kelly Blincoe, Auckland Univ. of Technology, New Zealand
  • Fabio Calefato, University of Bari, Italy
  • Francesca D’Errico, Uninettuno University, Italy
  • Subhajit Datta, Singapore Univ. of Technology and Design
  • Daniela Damian, University of Victoria, Canada
  • Daniel Graziotin, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
  • Emitzá Guzmán Ortega, Technische Universität München, Germany
  • Filippo Lanubile, University of Bari, Italy
  • Seok-Won Lee, Ajou University, Republic of Korea
  • Alessandro Murgia, University of Antwerp, Belgium
  • Chris Parnin, North Carolina State University, USA
  • Viviana Patti, University of Torino, Italy
  • Alexander Serebrenik, Eindhoven University of Technology The Netherlands
  • Janet Siegmund, University of Passau, Germany
  • Alessandro Vinciarelli, University of Glasgow, UK