Empathic AI: Face, Gesture, and Accessibility Technologies (EmpAI 2026)

Empathic AI: Face, Gesture, and Accessibility Technologies (EmpAI 2026)

in conjunction with FG 2026 (May 25-29, Kyoto, Japan)In the past decade, artificial intelligence (AI) has achieved remarkable progress in recognizing faces, gestures, and multimodal signals. However, the most challenging question remains: How can AI understand all humans, not only the “typical” ones? According to the World Health Organization (WHO) report in 2023, an estimated 1.3 billion people (about 16% of the global population) live with significant disabilities affecting vision, hearing, cognition, or mobility. Their gestures are subtler, their facial cues atypical, and their voices sometimes silent.
This workshop proposes “Empathic Intelligence,” which extends beyond perception and action, bringing social understanding, affective awareness, and human-centered reasoning into intelligent systems. We aim to explore how multimodal AI can perceive, express, and respond responsibly to non-normative human signals, designing technologies and applications that make the world more accessible, inclusive, and emotionally intelligent.
Whether you are a general public, a master/PhD student just starting, or an expert with years of interdisciplinary experience, this workshop provides useful research perspectives and practical skills.

https://fg2026.ieee-biometrics.org

Topic of Interest

Workshop topics include (but are not limited to):
Foundations of Empathic Intelligence

  • Predictive processing, embodied cognition, and symbol emergence
  • Modeling emotion, intention, and individual diversity
  • Multimodal learning across vision, physiology, and language
  • Computational modeling of emotion and intention under individual differences

Inclusive and Accessible Interaction

  • Face, gesture, and gaze systems for sensory, motor, or cognitive impairments
  • Adaptive interaction for diverse sensory, motor, and cognitive abilities
  • Assistive communication and embodied interaction (e.g., AR/VR accessibility)

Robustness Across Human Variability

  • Recognition under atypical, incomplete, or noisy signals
  • Learning from small, imbalanced, or underrepresented datasets
  • Fairness-aware benchmarking and evaluation frameworks

Ethics and Human-Centered Design

  • Privacy, consent, dignity, and value-sensitive design
  • Bias mitigation for accessibility-focused AI
  • Cross-disciplinary perspectives from neuroscience, psychology, and social sciences

Call for Papers

Download CFP (PDF)

Important Dates

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