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First Multimodal Banquet: Exploring Innovative Technology for Commensality and Human-Food Interaction (CoFI2024)
Held in conjunction with ICMI2024 (Costa Rica) https://icmi.acm.org/2024
Commensality, the act of eating together, is a truly multimodal and interactive experience that can be enriched with the use of technology. Consider the scenario of dining at a restaurant with a close companion. The interaction with food is a multimodal interaction where smells, colors, sounds, and textures accompany the taste to create a multisensory experience. Our perception of food is not only influenced by the food itself, but also external aspects such as the ambient sounds and music, the shape of our plates, or even the weight of our utensils. Simultaneously, the table is also the center of another type of interaction – the interaction between humans (and in future artificial companions), who share not only food but also a unique social experience. The nonverbal behavior of the commensals (eaters) is particularly rich, while they share attention between the food consumption and engagement in conversation with others. Commensality presents a unique opportunity to not only explore the multisensory and social principles of dining, but also how technology can play a pivotal role in enhancing this experience.
We aim to collect novel contributions that explore how interactive technology can enhance, facilitate, or make these experiences more enjoyable. More specifically, the aim of the workshop is to build an interdisciplinary community around the topics of multimodal interaction in commensal settings and human-food interaction, fostering collaboration, knowledge exchange and problem-solving among researchers with different backgrounds. In this workshop, we want to emphasize the role of multimodal interaction among commensal partners sharing food. At the same time, we actively seek the cross-fertilization between different communities (multimodal interaction, human-food interaction, HCI, social psychology) as several of the “Grand Challenges” [1] may be addressed with approaches widely used in the multimodal interaction community. This workshop is particularly timely, with the interest in interactive technologies related to food and eating together showing rapid expansion in recent initiatives, such as the COCOA project funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research [2], the Research Topic on Computational Commensality in Frontiers [3], and the rising number of previous workshops [4, 5, 7] including the identification of the above-mentioned Grand Challenges. Specifically, this workshop will build on these and our prior research initiatives, which have also identified significant roadblocks within the wider field, ranging from how digital innovations can transform our interaction with food and our commensal partners, addressing issues from sustainability, well-being, loneliness, and health, to food security and culinary experiences. Building on this foundation, we will bring together researchers and industry contacts to discuss, develop, and critique the future of related technologies. To achieve these goals, the primary workshop activity will be hands-on, using the design principles of “Magic Machines”. As described in detail later, in Magic Machines, participants are asked to create solutions to challenges or tasks wherein they can suspend current physical limitations to generate technology (or ideas) to solve these issues. In this context, ‘magic food machines’ will explore how multimodal technology could address the challenges of research in this field.
Welcoming diverse participants from fields like computer science and psychology, we aim to foster a exchange of ideas that would not otherwise be possible. The focus is on developing new solutions and speculative prototypes, with participants contributing to a post-workshop academic paper addressing some of the Grand Challenges. This endeavor is expected to influence research approaches and policy discussions, enhancing the study of multimodal interactive technology in commensal settings through hands-on speculative design.
References:
[1] Mueller, F.F., Obrist, M., Bertran, F.A., Makam, N., Kim, S., Dawes, C., … & Wang, Y. (2023). Grand Challenges in Human-Food Interaction, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies,Volume 183, 2024, 103197, ISSN 1071-581.
[2] Computational Models of COmmensality for artificial Agents (COCOA), the Italian Ministry of University and Research founded project founded by Next Generation EU.
[3] Mancini, M., Cavazza, N., Higgs, S., Huisman, G., Van Den Boer, J., Niewiadomski, R., Computational Commensality, Frontiers in Computer Science. 10.3389/fcomp.2022.1086841
[4] Workshop on Multisensory Approaches to Human-Food Interaction: https://multisensoryhfi.wordpress.com/
[5] Eat-IT: Interactive Food Workshop: https://www.dagstuhl.de/en/seminars/seminar-calendar/seminar-details/22272
[6] Niewiadomski, R., Ceccaldi, E., Huisman, G., Volpe, G., Mancini, M., Computational Commensality: From Theories to Computational Models for Social Food Preparation and Consumption in HCI, Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 6, 2019. 10.3389/frobt.2019.00119
[7] RETHINK EATING 2020 Conference, https://Conferences.Au.Dk/Rethinkeating2020
[8] Niewiadomski, R., Bruijnes, M., Huisman, G., Gallagher, C.P., Mancini, M. Social robots as eating companions, Frontiers in Computer Science, 4, 2022. doi: 10.3389/fcomp.2022.909844
[9] Niewiadomski, R., De Lucia, G., Grazzi, G., Mancini, R., Towards Commensal Activities Recognition, In Proceedings of the 2022 International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI ‘22), November 7–11, 2022, Bengaluru, India, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 549–557, 2022. doi: 10.1145/3536221.3556566