Special Session 1

It is generally known that environmental conditions affect human well-being and interactions between others. However, there have been less systematic studies on the effect and influence of the environment on human mood and interactions in everyday life. Moreover, given that smart environments are becoming more common, it is important to study how users can and wish to interact with such environments, and in particular, how the environment can provide the humans, in a natural manner, with information and advice about the current environmental state as well as warnings and alerts if the normal state changes dangerously.
Considering the availability of domotic and IoT sensor networks in living environments, it is possible to explore systematically how the environment affects the human comfort and well-being, and further, how these human states affect conversational presentations, such as providing reminders (take a water bottle when going out in a hot weather), and friendly advice (open the window when the air quality is poor).
In this special session, we encourage contributions that explore these issues further, e.g. evaluation of the uncertainty in the measurement of quantities related to well-being and comfort, which are affected by the environmental situation, sensors’ accuracy and used methodology. We are looking for contributions which study the use and impact of environmental conditions on the human well-being and comfort, and how the measurement of the user’s state can affect the decision making processes.

Sara Casaccia is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Industrial Engineering and Mathematical Sciences (DIISM) of Università Politecnica delle Marche (UNIVPM). Her research focuses on sensors and measurement techniques for supporting people in life environments (e.g. comfort, wellbeing), data processing to extract complex information (e.g. using AI), sensors for health, buildings and industrial applications.

Gian Marco Revel is Full Professor in Mechanical and Thermal Measurement at Università Politecnica delle Marche, where he is Rector Delegate for European Research. He received the Ph.D. degree in mechanical measurements from Università degli Studi di Padova in 1998. His research focuses on sensors and measurement technologies for buildings, health and industrial applications, with a particular focus on comfort and human behaviour and diagnostics.

Kristiina Jokinen is Senior Researcher at AIRC (Artificial Intelligence Research Center), AIST Tokyo Waterfront, Japan. Her research focuses on spoken dialogue systems, multimodal communication (speech, gaze, gesturing), and human-robot interaction. She led the development of WikiTalk, a Wikipedia-based talking robot information system, and has been Principal Investigator in multiple international projects.