Social cognition focuses on how people process, organize, and use information about other people in social situations. It is concerned with the role that cognitive processes play in our social interactions. Cognitive computing, on the other hand, typically refers to new hardware and/or software that mimics how the human brain operates and helps improve human decision-making. As such, it is a type of computing that seeks to more accurately model how the human brain/mind perceives, reasons, and responds to stimuli.
Thus, socio-cognitive computing is a set of theoretical interdisciplinary frameworks, methodologies, and hardware/software tools for modeling how the human brain mediates social interactions. In addition, affective computing is the study and development of systems and devices that detect, interpret, process, and simulate human affect, a fundamental aspect of socio-cognitive neuroscience.
Finally, physiological computing is a category of technology that uses electrophysiological data recorded directly from human activity to interface with a computing device. This technology will become even more relevant as computing becomes ubiquitous in everyday environments. Thus, socio-cognitive and affective computing systems should be able to adapt their behavior according to the physiological computing paradigm.
This special session on "Socio-Cognitive, Affective and Physiological Computing" aims to integrate these different but complementary fields. We welcome proposals from researchers who use signals from the brain and/or body to infer intentions and psychological states in intelligent computing systems. Designing such systems requires combining knowledge and methods from ubiquitous and pervasive computing and physiological data measurement and processing with those from socio-cognitive and affective computing.