Since the last two decades, a plethora of works show the central role of new technologies, such as Virtual Reality (VR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), in the study of human behaviours and brain activities for both healthy and clinical populations. Indeed, new evidence coming from Neuroscience and Psychology studies showed that VR leads people to respond in a realistic way to virtual stimuli and elicits physiological reactions as if a subject is physically situated in a real place [1], thus opening new frontiers for experimental research. Recent evidence also highlights the potential of the combination of VR and AI in medical settings. Their combination, in fact, is able to cope with some problems, such as the increasing of health-care costs and the need of improvements in the quality and quantity of rehabilitation treatments [2]. Thus, the workshop aims at shaping new frontiers about the use of advanced technologies in the research field of medical applications. Indeed, we solicit contributions in all related topics to obtain an overview of the most recent findings and bring new insight for development of clinical and rehabilitation treatments.

The workshop will be also the opportunity to: i) start a vivid discussion between the participants of the workshop, the presenters of the papers, and the keynote speakers; ii) create a new community of experts that could collaborate in future projects and share ideas.



[1]. Maria V. Sanchez-Vives and Mel Slater. 2005. From presence to consciousness through virtual reality. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 6 (2005), 332–339.
[2]. Gaetano Tieri, Giovanni Morone, Stefano Paolucci, and Marco Iosa. 2018. Virtual reality in cognitive and motor rehabilitation: facts, fiction and fallacies. Expert review of medical devices 15:2 (2018), 107–117.

TOPICS
All topics are focused (but not limited) to the following list:

VR, AI and advanced technologies as new tools for scientific research and clinical applications;
- Applications in Cognitive and Motor rehabilitation;
- Behavioural, Body and Brain reactivity to virtual stimuli in healthy and clinical population;
- Brain dynamics of VR rehabilitation treatments;
- Applications on Sense of Embodiment and body related disorder;
- Supervised and Unsupervised machine learning techniques to improve advanced (thus including VR-based) rehabilitation treatments and clinical assessments;
- AI applications to biometrics features modelling and classification;
- VR and AI to improve life quality and treatments of clinical population;
- Novel technologies to develop advanced home-based treatments.

According to both the target audience of EICS 2019 (i.e, experts of models, languages, notations, methods, techniques and tools that support designing and developing interactive systems) and the multidisciplinary nature of the workshop, the goal is to bring together experts from different research fields working on the above topics, that can foster discussion, ideas, and sparks for current challenges and future research in this area.
SUBMISSION:

SUBMISSION:
We consider three different submission types: regular (14 pages), short (6 pages) and extended abstracts (4 pages).

Research and position papers (regular or short): should be clearly placed with respect to the state of the art and state the contribution of the proposal in the domain of application, even if presenting preliminary results.
Practice and experience reports (short): should present in detail the real-world scenarios in which novel technologies are employed for medical applications.
Demo proposals (extended abstract): should present the details of a prototype or complete system, to be demonstrated/showed to the workshop attendees.

Papers should be submitted (starting from Feb 17 2019) in PDF format, electronically, using the EasyChair submission system, available at: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=vraima2019 .
All papers must be formatted according to this (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ahfCysIJHRtckrKtTIyLMY8M6AMMSGGC/view?usp=sharing) latex template.
All contributions will be selected (with a double-blind review process) by a selected international program committee of experts. The accepted works will be published on CEUR Workshop Proceedings (http://ceur-ws.org/).

IMPORTANT DATES (new):
April 5th, 2019 - deadline for contributes submission
May 3rd, 2019 - authors notification
May 17th, 2019 - camera ready due
Workshop: 18 June 2019

Organizers
- Stefano Faralli
https://www.unitelmasapienza.it/it/contenuti/personale/stefano-faralli
- Gaetano Tieri
https://www.unitelmasapienza.it/it/contenuti/personale/gaetano-tieri

CONTACTS

- google group: https://groups.google.com/d/forum/vraima2019
- email: vraima2019@googlegroups.com