Overview

Affective computing spans a broad research field from the recognition to the expression of emotions, which is of interest for software systems as they are designed and used by humans. For requirements engineering (RE), understanding and utilizing personality traits, attitudes, moods, and emotions plays a crucial role in various facets, reaching from the consideration of individual professionals and team performance during RE activities to the utilization of end-user emotions as a means to validate requirements.

Goal

The AffectRE workshop aims at creating an international, sustainable community where researchers and practitioners can meet, present, and discuss their current work to affect the RE community with ideas from affective computing. In its fifth edition, this workshop fosters high-quality contributions about empirical studies, theoretical models, and tools that raise emotion awareness in RE.

Attending AffectRE'23

For the first time in the past 4 years the workshop will be a live event, co-located with RE'23 in Hannover, Germany. We look forward to an in-person gathering, to facilitate AffectRE, hoping to make it an interactive, dynamic format where participants can engage in ad-hoc discussions besides the presentations and keynotes. The venue of the workshop will be Leibniz University Hannover.

The exact location and time of AffectRE'23 will be announced soon.

Motivation

From the perspective of end-users, awareness of emotions to be experienced by them is of utmost importance in RE and therefore emotional requirements should be addressed as first-class citizens. From requirements elicitation to negotiation, from modelling to prioritization, and from software design to implementation, different emotions arise and stakeholders’ cognitive states evolve differently.

The theme of the main conference puts a strong focus on contemporary problems that are centered around user feedback and its role for requirements. This emphasizes that end users are more and more involved in the RE process. With the AffectRE workshop, we want to shield a light on the emotions that accompany the users’ acceptance of a system, which can be expressed through both implicit and explicit reactions. The sentiment expressed together with their opinions helps to assess important topics and creates actionable insights. We envision that new and innovative products can further advance such approaches. AffectRE allows the reporting on insights and experiences with emerging techniques, products, and methods, which may be new to the RE community.

We need methods and artifacts that facilitate involving stakeholders in the activities of eliciting and modelling emotional requirements through appropriate approaches of participatory design, also known as co-design. Moreover, it is increasingly important to understand emotions and affects to be experienced by people within sociotechnical systems where users are viewed as parts of the system and artificial intelligence increasingly blurs the distinction between humans and technology. One way to study such systems is agent-based simulations of emotions and personality traits as it is cheaper than performing psychological experiments with humans. Such simulations also fall within the scope of the workshop.

Topics of Interest

We intend the workshop to be primarily a forum for presentation and discussion of:

• New ideas identifying synergies between RE and affective computing, including emotions, affects, psychometrics, and cognition;
• New research questions for the agenda of the community;
• Affective computing approaches applied to RE;
• New methods of engineering emotional requirements;
• Empirical studies;
• Preliminary results

This workshop addresses affective computing in RE. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Impact of affective and cognitive states (affects, emotions, moods, attitudes, personality traits) on individual and group performance, commitment and collaboration in RE;
• Methods and artifacts for elicitation and representation of emotional requirements, including the relevant approaches of participatory design (co-design);
• Leveraging affective feedback by stakeholders to improve requirements, tools, and processes (e.g., capturing and analyzing the sentiments of users and community feedback and sentiment analysis of product reviews);
• Exploration of biometric sensors emerging from new commercial hardware which enable new measurement techniques to support the verification and validation of functional, nonfunctional (quality) and emotional requirements;
• Emotional and cognitive aspects of interactions between RE and other activities of a software process, such as testing (e.g., in the communication between requirements engineers and testers);
• Design, development, and evaluation of frameworks and tools for eliciting, representing and validating emotional requirements;
• Ethnographic approaches to monitor affective factors in workplaces of IT industry;
• Defining or adapting psychological models to RE (e.g., understanding the triggers behind positive and negative emotions, modeling coarse vs. fine-grained emotions, and applying up-to-date theories of emotion);
• Detection of affective and cognitive states from the multimodal analysis of spontaneous communicative behavior, such as a natural language, body postures and gestures, speech, or conversations;
• Sensing from communication artifacts (e.g., message boards, social media) and techniques/tools for extracting and summarizing affects and emotions from such channels;
• Interplay between affects and exogenous or endogenous workplace factors (e.g., physical location of the stakeholders, organizational hierarchy, adopted technologies);
• Emotion and cognition awareness in cross-cultural stakeholder teams (e.g., in global software development);
• The relationship and interplay between emotional requirements and human values in different cultural contexts;
• Mutual emotion-awareness: affect display rules and how displaying emotions enhances trust, appreciation, cooperation, and other outcomes of RE activities;
• Software frameworks, APIs, and patterns for designing and maintaining affect- and cognitive-aware RE systems (e.g., for integrating sensing of affects in requirements management tools).

Submission

We invite three types of contributions (all page limits include references):

• Full research papers (up to 6 pages) describe original work, such as novel approaches or frameworks, which are supported by initial validation results. Empirical evaluations and industrial experience reports are welcomed as well.
• Short position papers (up to 4 pages) describe a new idea or work in progress that is currently in an early development stage.
• Extended abstracts (up to 2 pages) outline a research project or newly developed tools, techniques or datasets, which must be supported by a poster on the workshop day.

At least two 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 in the workshop.

How to submit: All papers must be written in English, describe work that may not have been previously published, are currently not submitted elsewhere, and address at least one of the workshop topics of interest. The papers further must conform, at the time of submission, to the IEEE formatting instructions Papers must be submitted electronically in PDF format using EasyChair.

Accepted papers will be submitted for publication in the IEEE Digital Library as part of the joint RE'23 workshop proceedings if at least one author registers for and presents their work at the workshop. Also, presenters are expected to attend and actively participate in the entire workshop.

Committees

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us using our email addresses available below, or contact us via social media.

Organization Committee

Program Committee

• Raian Ali, Hamad Bin Khalifa University (Qatar)
• Rachel Burrows, Google (United Kingdom)
• Giuseppe Destefanis, Brunel University (UK)
• Davide Fucci, Blekinge Institute of Technology (Sweden)
• Mohamad Gharib, University of Tartu (Estonia)
• Eduard C. Groen, Fraunhofer IESE (Germany)
• Oliver Karras, Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology (Germany)
• Seok-Won Lee, Ajou University (Republic of Korea)
• Kashumi Madampe, Monash University (Australia)
• Alexander Nolte, University of Tartu (Estonia)
• Kurt Schneider, Leibniz University Hannover (Germany)
• Norbert Seyff, University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland (Switzerland)
• Paola Spoletini, Kennesaw State University (USA)
• Leon Sterling, Swinburne University of Technology (Australia)
• Jordi Vallverdú, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain)

Program

To be announced