Welcome to SSPandBE 2017, the First International Workshop on Social Signal Processing and Beyond. The workshop is held in Catania, Italy, in conjunction with the 19th International Conference on Image Analysis and Patterns (ICIAP 2017) on September 11 or 12 2017. The location of workshop is the Monastero of Benedettini, included in the World Heritage List since 2002.

Social Signal Processing is the domain aimed at studying social behavior, in particular its nonverbal aspects, comprehensively covering the aspects of analysis, synthesis and modeling. To date, the field has focused on face-to-face interactions where it is possible to use the whole range of nonverbal cues that people utilizes to communicate. However, increasingly more interactions take place in unconstrained or virtual scenarios. Examples include, but are not limited to groups and crowd, everyday interactions captured by wearable cameras, social interactions in a virtual setting.

The study of behavioral cues within social signal processing has been so far mostly limited to visual behavioral cues such as gesture, posture, gaze, physical appearance, and proxemics. Other social signals that may trigger or impede social interactions such as architecture and the use of the illumination just to name a few, have been traditionally little studied.

The workshop provides an interdisciplinary forum to bring together researchers and professionals working in several fields including computer vision, pattern recognition, social science, smart architecture, smart lighting and domotics to present novel ideas and discussing future directions in this scenario.