Submissions are invited for a special session on Advances in Cognitive and Emotional Information Processing (ACEIP) to be held within the 2012 International Symposium on Neural Networks (ISNN), taking place from 11th to 14th July in Shenyang (China).

ABSTRACT
Cognitive and Emotional Information Processing techniques have encountered a large success within the scientific community, specially due to the impact they naturally have in diverse application fields as commerce, tourism, education and health. A wide number of advanced solutions have been proposed on purpose spanning from User/Web Interfaces and Mobile Computing to Robotics, Ambient Intelligence, and Computer Support to Collaborative Work/Learning. The objective is devoted to adequately interpret humans’ opinions, tastes and needs and consequently provide not only useful direct feedback to them but also a valid and natural support to the interactions they can have between themselves and with smart cooperative environments. This asks for development of expert systems, able to manage large amount of information coming from sensory activity, to intelligently process it, and to promptly and knowledgeably respond to human actions according to natural interaction standards and by means of suitable actuary devices. Information processing therefore plays a central role from this perspective, operating at different levels, from multimodal digital data manipulation to semantic metadata processing, and necessarily encompassing the most challenging computational intelligence paradigms for contextual adaptation, social-emotional competence, and cognitive reasoning abilities. Moreover, if on one hand the distillation of knowledge from such type data is a key factor for most of the applications it must be also said on the other hand that the extremely unstructured nature of these contents and their exponentially growing size make it a very difficult task to be faced. Information scientists working in related areas such as multimedia, machine learning, knowledge management, affective computing or semantic web are invited to contribute to attain the above research aims, by sharing their expertise in this emerging interdisciplinary field, and at the same time paving the way to new exciting research topics in the cognitive and emotional information processing field.

TOPICS
Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
• Socio-Emotional Data Processing Techniques and Applications
• Human Behaviour Analysis and Understanding
• Cognitive Systems for Multimodal Interaction
• Cognitive-Emotional Models in Cooperative Scenarios
• Computational Intelligence Techniques for Affective Computing
• Semantic Information Processing
• Multimedia-interfaced Systems for Human-Machine Interaction

TIMEFRAME
• February 15th, 2012: Due date for Special Session papers
• March 15th, 2012: Notification of paper acceptance to authors
• April 5th, 2012: Camera-ready of accepted papers
• July 11th, 2012: Special Session date

SUBMISSION AND PROCEEDINGS
Prospective authors are invited to submit full-length papers (6-8 pages normally and 10 pages maximum) by the submission deadline through the online submission system. The submission of a paper implies that the paper is original and has not been submitted under review or copyright protected elsewhere and will be presented by an author if accepted. All submitted papers will be refereed by experts in the field based on the criteria of originality, significance, quality, and clarity. The authors of accepted papers will have an opportunity to revise their papers and take consideration of the referees’ comments and suggestions. All papers accepted by and presented at BICS 2012 will be published by Springer as multiple volumes of Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence which will be indexed by EI and ISTP. Selected papers will be published in special issues of several SCI journals.

ORGANIZERS
• Stefano Squartini, Marche Polytechnic University (Italy)
• Erik Cambria, National University of Singapore (Singapore)
• Francesco Piazza, Marche Polytechnic University (Italy)
• Bjoern Schuller, Technical University of Munich (Germany)