Emotional and Social Signals: A Neglected Frontier in Multimedia Computing?

The role of emotional and social signals in multimedia has not been a core concern of the multimedia research community--an omission explored at the 22nd ACM International Conference on Multimedia during a panel titled, "Emotional and Social Signals in Multimedia: Where Art Thou?" The panel discussion revealed major gaps in the formulation, understanding, and application of emotional and social signal processing in the multimedia domain. Here, the authors review the challenges in bringing this new domain to multimedia, summarizing current feelings in the research community based on discussions during the panel.