CALL FOR PAPERS
AAMAS 2010 Workshop on
INTERACTING WITH ECAS AS VIRTUAL CHARACTERS
May 10 or May 11, 2010
Toronto, Canada
http://tinyurl.com/ECA10
Despite advances in enhancing the expressivity of embodied conversational agents (ECAs), communication with ECAs remains an unnatural experience due to an often encountered asymmetry in communication channels, in which user input modalities tend to be less sophisticated due to the limitation of input processing. This is becoming a limiting factor as virtual actors become an essential element of computer games, intelligent tutoring systems and new media such as Interactive Storytelling. Furthermore, user-agent communication should be properly situated in the context of the application at hand rather than isolated as a laboratory experiment. In addition, interaction with ECAs implicitly creates a social environment which requires mechanisms for recognizing the user’s affective, attentive and social cues. Nevertheless, research on the integration of speech, vision and other non-verbal sensors into an ECA’s conversational model is still rare compared to the enormous amount of work that has been done on the planning and rendering of ECA behaviors.
The workshop aims to bring together researchers working on intelligent virtual agents, social robots and human-computer interaction to share recent advances and discuss research directions and opportunities in exploring novel forms of interaction with embodied conversational agents in order to reduce the asymmetry in communication channels. We specifically welcome research taking place within realistic scenarios or applications (entertainment, tutoring systems, persuasive systems, Interactive Narrative). We invite submissions of research papers and position papers that consider at least one input channel to ECAs and address the following areas (but not limited to):
• Integration of speech, vision and other sensor-based technologies in dialogue understanding for ECAs
• Perception and interpretation of affective, social and attentive cues from users during human-agent dialogue
• Perception-based models of grounding and turn-taking
• Alignment and synchrony of perceptive and expressive behaviors in human-agent dialogue
• Natural language dialogue with ECAs in augmented and mixed realities
• Applications that emulate characteristics of human-agent dialogue, such as games and interactive storytelling
• Empirical studies that explore the potential benefits of speech, vision and other sensor-based technologies for human-agent-communication
Submission Guidelines
There are three categories of paper submissions:
Long papers: a maximum of 8 pages
Short papers: a maximum of 4 pages.
Position papers and project notes: a maximum of 2 pages
All submissions should be prepared according to the standard AAMAS publications format. For your convenience, we provide paper templates in Microsoft Word and LaTeX on the workshop webpage. All papers should be submitted via the workshop webpage: http://tinyurl.com/ECA10
Video submissions are encouraged. Please let us know however in advance if your files are larger than 128 MB.
The accepted papers will be distributed during the workshop. We plan to publish revised versions of selected workshop papers in Springer’s LNCS series.
Organizers:
Elisabeth André (Primary Contact)
Institut für Informatik, Universität Augsburg,
Universitätsstr. 6a, 86159 Augsburg, Germany, Phone +49 821
598 2341, Fax +49 821 598 2349
Email: andre@informatik.uni-augsburg.de
Marc Cavazza
University of Teesside, School of Computing, Middlesbrough,
TS1 3BA, United Kingdom, Phone: 44 1642 218121, Fax: 44 1642 230 527
Email: m.o.cavazza@tees.ac.uk
Catherine Pelachaud
CNRS; LTCI, Institut Télécom; Télécom, ParisTech, Paris,
France
Email: catherine.pelachaud@telecom-paristech.fr
PC members:
Ruth Aylett, Heriot Watt University, UK
Lawrence Cavedon, NICTA, Australia
Patrick Gebhard, DFKI, Germany
Dirk Heylen, University of Twente, NL
Michael Kipp, DFKI, Germany
Brent Lance, USC Institute for Creative Technologies, USA
Oliver Lemon, University of Edinburgh, UK
Stacy Marsella, USC
Institute for Creative Technologies, USA
Jean-Claude Martin, LIMSI-CNRS, France
Louis-Philippe Morency, USC Institute for Creative Technologies, USA
Yukiko Nakano, Seikei University, Japan
Toyoaki Nishida, Kyoto University, Japan
Dominique Noël, CEO As An Angel SA, France
Ana Paiva, INESC-ID, Portugal
Helmut Prendinger, National Institute of Informatics (NII), Tokyo, Japan
Candy Sidner, BAE Systems AIT, USA
David Traum, USC Institute for Creative Technologies, USA
Markku Turunen, University of Tampere, Finland
Important Dates:
FEBRUARY 2, 2010 – Submission of contributions to workshops
MARCH 2, 2010 – Workshop paper acceptance notification
MARCH 12, 2010 – Camera-ready copy
MAY 10 or MAY 11, 2010 – Workshop