SEmotion 2020

Motivation

Affective computing is the study and development of systems and devices that can recognize, interpret, process, and simulate human affects—i.e., the experience of feelings or emotions. Over the past decade, research has shown the impact of affective states on work performance and on team collaboration. This also applies to software engineering that involves people in a broad range of activities, where personality, moods, and emotions play a crucial role. For successful software engineering projects, stakeholders need to experience positive affect (such as trust or appreciation), to agree on display rules for emotions, and to hold mutual commitment to the project goals. Recently, researchers started to study the role of affective computing and affective states in software engineering. However, contributions on this topic are currently presented and discussed in diverse conferences and workshops. This workshop follows on the fourth edition held at ICSE 2019, towards the consolidation of an international, sustainable forum for researchers and practitioners interested in the role of affect in software engineering to meet, present, and discuss their work in progress. High-quality contributions about empirical studies, theoretical models, as well as tools for supporting emotion awareness in software engineering are invited to the workshop from both academia and industry.

Topics

Affective states play a crucial role in daily work since they might affect the performance and outcome of both individual and group activities. Personality traits, moods, and emotions contribute to the affective climate of a project or an organization since affective states are experienced continuously and communicated through direct or computer-mediated interactions. Leveraging emotion awareness in software engineering could enhance the development performance, quality of software, mood regulation within a project team, and fruitful interactions with all stakeholders involved in the software engineering domain. This workshop will identify and address challenges posed by emotion awareness in software engineering. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Impact of affective states (emotions, moods, attitudes, personality traits) on individual and group performance, commitment and collaboration in software engineering
• The role of affect in the social programmer ecosystem
• Leveraging stakeholders affective feedback to improve software, tools, and processes (e.g., sentiment analysis of users feedback, aspect-based sentiment analysis of product reviews, etc.)
• Design, development, and evaluation of tools and datasets for supporting emotion awareness in software engineering
• Reusable software frameworks, APIs, and patterns for designing and maintaining affect-aware systems
• Ethnographic approaches to affect monitoring in the workplace of software projects
• Psychology of programming and modeling of affective states (e.g., psychological models of affect in software engineering, understanding the trigger behind emotions during developers activities, etc.)
• Affective state detection from multimodal analysis of spontaneous communicative behavior such as natural language processing, use of biometric measurements, analysis of body posture and gesture, speech analysis
• Affect sensing from communication artifacts (e.g., message boards, issue tracking, social media)
• Methodologies for large-scale emotion mining
• Emotion awareness in requirements engineering, software design, and software management
• Emotion awareness in software design philosophies, development practices, and tools
• Emotion awareness of developers of different genders, cultures, ages
• Emotion awareness in cross-cultural teams in global software development
• Methodologies and standards
• Replications of prior studies

Types of Contributions and Format Guidelines

We invite three kinds of submissions:

• Full papers (6 pages) describing emotion awareness challenges, needs, novel approaches, and frameworks. New approaches must be evaluated with users in this category. Empirical evaluation papers and industrial experience reports are also welcome.
• Short papers (3-4 pages) describing new ideas, works in progress, datasets/artifacts, or tools/demos.
• Posters (1-2 pages) summarizing research projects, demos, techniques.

We encourage the submission of negative results as well as study design which can be evaluated with the participants in a live study session taking place during the workshop.

All papers must be in English and must conform, at time of submission, to the ICSE formatting guidelines for Technical Research (see How to submit). Papers must be submitted electronically, in PDF format. The submission site is hosted by EasyChair and can be accessed here.

Three members from the international program committee will review each submission. Papers will be evaluated based on their originality, relevance to the workshop, and their potential for discussion. The papers with the best reviews will be accepted to be presented at the workshop. All accepted papers will be distributed to workshop participants and will be invited to be included in a workshop proceedings published in the ACM and IEEE CS Digital Libraries.

Live Studies

This year, we would like to invite the workshop attendees to voluntarily engage in a “live study.” A live study can be, for example, a (controlled) experiment, an (online) survey, a user study, a focus group relevant to the topics of the workshop.

Live study proposals (max 6 pages) should address at least the following items.

1. Plan and Design

• Research goal
• Research questions, including any hypothesis
• Research method(s) (e.g., experiment, online survey, focus group study)
• Population of interest (i.e., target of generalisation)
• Description or profile of the subjects, such as experience, background, etc.
• Study design (depending on the research methods)
• Equipment and infrastructure needed for performing the study (PCs, software, flipcharts)
• Type of data that will be collected
• Type of analysis that will be carried out on the gathered data
• Anticipated threats to the validity of the results and possible mitigation procedures
• Ethical issues (e.g., informed consent, confidentiality and privacy, fair treatment of subjects)

2. Relevance and Feasibility

• Relevance of study for research and/or for practice
• Benefits to the subjects of participating in the study, including incentives
• Plan to make publicity of the study if selected, and to attract participants
• Plant for disseminating preliminary results with the attendees after the workshop

3. About the researchers

• Record of past empirical studies performed by the submitters
• Role of the proposed study in the submitter’s research agenda (e.g., plans for replications, hypothesis based on the researcher’s previous experience)

Live study submissions will be reviewed based on:

• Relevance to the workshop topics
• Soundness and feasibility of the proposal
• Potential for attracting a suitable number of participants
• Impact on the advancement of the submitter’s research plan

A link to a complete description of the protocol must be included in the camera-ready version of accepted submissions.

During the workshop, the authors of the accepted proposals will introduce their study to the participants and conduct it according to the proposed plan.

Dates

• Paper submissions: January 29, 2020
• Notification to authors: February 25, 2020
• Camera-ready copies due: April 7, 2020
• Workshop: July TBD, 2020 (Online)

Organizers

• Davide Fucci, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden
• Hidetake Uwano, National Institute of Technology, Nara, Japan