Call for Papers

1st Workshop on Multimodal Virtual Agents for Mental Health and Wellbeing – A new world with foundation models
To be held in conjunction with the 23rd ACM International Conference on Virtual Agents (IVA 2023)
Würzburg, Germany
September 19-22, 2023
https://iva.acm.org/2023/1st-workshop-on-multimodal-virtual-agents-for-mental-healthand-wellbeing-a-new-world-with-foundation-models/

Submission deadline: July 19, 2023

We are pleased to announce the 1st IVA Workshop on “Multimodal Virtual Agents for Mental Health and Wellbeing – A new world with foundation models”, which will be held in conjunction with the 23rd ACM International Conference on Virtual Agents taking place in Würzburg, Germany, from Sept 19th -22nd, 2023. The workshop will explore the applications of cutting-edge Multimodal Virtual Agents to Digital Mental Health and Wellbeing solutions. This would include interactive Multimodal Virtual Agents equipped with facial and voice affect sensing capabilities, extending this beyond the use of pre-scripted text-to-speech technologies, to the integration of revolutionary foundation language models, e.g., GPT, DALL.E, that could enable real-time natural language processing for a more engaging and empathic conversational experience. We are inviting paper submissions exploring the applications of face, voice, and language Foundation Models in building mental health applications.

Topics of interest include:

• Recognition of mental health conditions from face and voice
• Improving delivery of mental health treatment using empathetic virtual agents
• Providing mental health advise using virtual agents
• Reports of real-world deployment of virtual agents
• Ethical issues of virtual agents for mental health

Important dates:

• Wed 19 July 2023 – Submission deadline
• Mon 31 July 2023 – Notification of acceptance
• Tue 15 Aug 2023 – ‘Camera ready’ version deadline
• Tue 19 Sept 2023 – Workshop day of Conference

Organisers: Prof Michel Valstar (University of Nottingham/BlueSkeye AI), Dr Mani Tellamekala (Blueskeye AI), Dr Joy Egede (University of Nottingham) and Dr Nicholas Cummins (King’s College London).

For inquiries about the workshop, please contact Mani Tellamekala (mani@blueskeye.com), or Joy Egede (joy.egede@nottingham.ac.uk).

More information including submission instructions are available on the IVA Conference website: https://iva.acm.org/2023/1st-workshop-on-multimodal-virtual-agents-for-mental-healthand-wellbeing-a-new-world-with-foundation-models/