EAST-EI: Explainable Affective Systems for Transparency in Emotionally Intelligent Interactions

Welcome to our EAST-EI Workshop! We aim to attract a diverse audience from affective computing, explainable AI, HCI, and related fields.

Saturday 11 October 2025 - ACII 2025 Workshop - Canberra, Australia

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Description

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly embedded in our daily lives, from virtual companions and social platforms to wearable technologies and physical environments such as eldercare robots. With this proliferation, a critical challenge that has emerged is understanding how AI systems make decisions involving human emotions and related data. Consequently, “Emotional intelligence (EI)”, the capacity to recognise, understand, and manage one's emotions and influence others, is crucial for navigating interpersonal relationships and adapting to social contexts in human-AI interactions.

Advancing emotionally intelligent human-AI interactions requires designing systems that can learn from sensitive human data across various modalities. Affective computing plays a key role in this progress, enabling AI systems to analyse and respond to emotional cues such as facial expressions, voice intonations, and physiological signals. The ultimate goal is to develop systems capable of perceiving, recognising, and understanding human emotions, enabling them to respond intelligently, sensitively, and naturally, thus making human-computer interactions (HCI) more seamless and intuitive. However, as these systems become more sophisticated, ensuring fairness and upholding ethical standards is crucial. This necessitates integrating principles of explainable AI (XAI) into affective systems, allowing researchers and users to understand how emotional data is processed and utilised. By fostering transparency and trust, explainable affective systems can drive significant advancements in emotionally intelligent interactions.

EAST-EI workshop, in line with the conference theme “Socially Responsible Affective Computing”, aims to bring together leading researchers, engineers, and practitioners from academia, government, and industry to explore the complex challenges of explainable affective systems, focusing on human emotions, multimodal data, and the role of XAI in ensuring ethical and fair practices. Building robust, explainable affective systems and designing transparent, emotionally intelligent interactions are critical to fostering trust and ensuring compliance with ethical guidelines. This workshop will provide a premier platform for sharing innovative research, solutions, and approaches to overcoming challenges in building explainable affective systems.

Call for Participation

Submission deadline: 30 June 2025

TBU

Paper Submission Guidelines

We welcome original contributions that have not been published and are not currently under consideration by any other conference or journal. Papers should be formatted using the ACII 2025 templates (e.g., Word, Latex, or Overleaf) and guidelines. Papers will be reviewed double-blindly, i.e., each paper will be assessed by two or three reviewers. Accepted papers will be published and indexed in the IEEE Digital Xplore Library under the ACII 2025 adjunct proceedings. Authors should submit papers on EasyChair.

Important Dates

Tentative Agenda

Organisers

Contact

Please email Dr Gelareh Mohammadi at g.mohammadi@unsw.edu.au