Sanjaya Wijeratne, a Ph.D. student at Wright State University along with Dr. Emre Kıcıman from Microsoft Research AI - USA, Prof. Horacio Saggion from Universitat Pompeu Fabra - Spain, and Prof. Amit Sheth from Wright State University - USA, organize the first emoji workshop, titled International Workshop on Emoji Understanding and Applications in Social Media. "Emoji2018" for short. The workshop is held in conjunction with The 12​th​ International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM-18) at Stanford University, California, USA.

The workshop attracts more than 35 attendees representing many disciplines. The workshop program includes a keynote, a tutorial, a total of 8 paper presentations, and a panel discussion with leading researchers and practitioners. The proceedings for the 2018 workshop are available at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2130/.

The workshop has been held every year since, the latest being Emoji2021.