We got two full papers accepted at the next ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interactions:

• N.Aloshban, A.Esposito and A.Vinciarelli, “Detecting Depression in Less Than 10 Seconds: Impact of Speaking Time on Depression Detection Sensitivity“, Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, 2020.
• D.B.Vo, S.Brewster and A.Vinciarelli, “Did the Children Behave? Investigating the Relationship Between Attachment Condition and Child Computer Interaction“, Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, 2020.

Both articles revolve around mental health issues and, in particular, around the possibility to infer the mental conditions of people from their observable behaviour. In the case of depression, the approach takes into account what people say and how they say it. The focus is on the possibility to detect depression using only a few seconds of speech, something that it is important because depressed people find it difficult to speak for long time. In the case of attachment, the proposed approach analyses the way children use an interactive system and the results show that secure children tend to better interact with the design of the system, in line with the expectations of Attachment Theory.

It is a great pleasure to say that the publications have been obtained with the help of one of my most senior PhD students (Nujud Aloshban) and an experienced postdoctoral researchers with whom I have been collaborating for 5 years.