Call for Submissions

ACM 24th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents
September 16-19, 2024
University of Glasgow, Scotland
https://iva.acm.org/2024/

Submission deadline: April 5, 2024

Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA) Annual Conference is the premier international event for interdisciplinary research on the design, application, and evaluation of Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) with a specific focus on the ability to socially interact.

IVA 2024, the 24th Annual Conference, will be held in Glasgow, Scotland, September 16-19, 2024.

Note IVA 2024 will be co-located with the conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII).

IVAs are interactive characters that exhibit human-like capabilities including communicating using natural human modalities such as facial expressions, speech and gesture. IVAs are also capable of real-time perception, cognition, emotion and action that allows them to participate in dynamic social interactions.

IVA 2024 aims to showcase cutting-edge research on the design, application, and evaluation of IVAs, as well as the basic research underlying the technology that supports human-agent interaction such as social perception, dialog modeling, and social behavior planning. We also welcome submissions on central theoretical issues, uses of virtual agents in psychological research and showcases of working applications.

IVA 2024 offers two submission tracks: Papers (8 pages, not including references) and Extended Abstracts (3 pages, not including references).

All submissions will be double-blind peer-reviewed by expert reviewers. All accepted full paper submissions will be presented orally and published in the proceedings. Accepted extended abstracts will be presented as a talk or a poster, depending on the outcome of the review process. Accepted extended abstracts will also be published in the proceedings, unless the authors do not want it published.

Interdisciplinary Format:

IVA is traditionally a highly interdisciplinary conference. As part of ensuring that, IVA 2024 will account for different publication norms across disciplines. For example, conference publication is a norm in Computer Science whereas journal publications are the norm in Psychology. To accommodate these differences while fostering trans-disciplinary interaction, accepted extended abstracts may be selected for oral presentation in addition to the standard of a poster presentation. Also, authors of extended abstracts will have the option of whether their abstract publication is archival.

SCOPE AND LIST OF TOPICS

IVA invites submissions on a broad range of topics, including but not limited to:

Agent design and modeling of:

• Cognition
• Emotion (including personality and cultural differences)
• Socially communicative behavior (e.g., of emotions, personality traits)
• Conversational behavior
• Social perception
• Machine learning approaches to agent modeling
• Approaches to realizing adaptive behavior
• Models informed by theoretical and empirical research in psychology

Multimodal interaction:

• Verbal and nonverbal behavior coordination
• Face-to-face communication skills
• Engagement
• Managing co-presence and interpersonal relation
• Multi-party interaction
• Data driven multimodal modeling

Social agent architectures:

• Design criteria and design methodologies
• Engineering of real-time human-agent interaction
• Standards / measures to support interoperability
• Portability and reuse
• Specialized tools, toolkits and tool chains

Evaluation methods and studies:

• Evaluation methodologies and user studies
• Ethical considerations and societal impact
• Applicable lessons across fields (e.g. between robotics and virtual agents)
• Social agents as a means to study and model human behavior

Applications:

• Applications in education, skills training, health, counseling, games, art, etc.
• Virtual agents in games and simulations
• Social agents as tools in psychology
• Migration of agents between platforms

Special Theme:

A special theme this year at IVA will be on the use of multimodal machine learning and large language/foundation models in agent design and implementation, as well as comparison of these techniques to alternative approaches. These advances promise to make virtual agents more robust, human-like and capable of autonomous open-ended interaction. At the same time these advances can raise critical ramifications for the design process’s ability to ensure the behavior of the agent is appropriately circumscribed for an application.

Note: IVA 2024 will as usual have a doctoral consortium, workshops and demos. Details on submissions can be found at the web site: https://iva.acm.org/2024/

INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS

Paper and extended abstract submissions should be anonymous and prepared in the “ACM Standard” format, more specifically the “SigConf” format.

• The LaTeX template for the “ACM Standard”/”SigConf” format can be found inside the official 2017 ACM Master article template package. Please use the most recent version (1.65) available at:  https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template
• The “ACM Standard” Microsoft Word template is currently not part of the downloadable package as the ACM is currently revising it to improve accessibility of resulting PDF-documents. Please use the “Interim Word Template” instead: https://www.acm.org/binaries/content/assets/publications/word_style/interim-template-style/interim-layout-.docx

IVA 2024 accepts two types of submissions:

• Full papers: 8 pages (not including references)
• Extended abstracts: 3 pages (not including references)

All submissions should be in PDF-format.

IMPORTANT DATES

• Preliminary abstract submissions (mandatory, to assign reviewers)
  • Submission Deadline: 28th March 2024 (23:59 UTC-12)
• Papers and Extended Abstracts Submission
  • Submission Deadline: 5th April 2024 (23:59 UTC-12)
• Review Process
  • Initial Review Notification/Start Rebuttal Phase: 10th May 2024
  • Rebuttals Due: 17th May 2024 (23:59 UTC-12)
  • Notification of acceptance: 7th June 2024
  • Camera Ready Due: 7th July 2024 (23:59 UTC-12)

All deadlines are anywhere on earth (UTC−12)

ORGANIZATION

General Chairs: generalchairs@iva.acm.org
Rachael Jack (University of Glasgow, UK)
Mathieu Chollet (University of Glasgow, UK)
Ruth Aylett (Heriot Watt University, UK)

Program Chairs: programmchairs@iva.acm.org
Timothy Bickmore (Northeastern University, USA)
Gale Lucas (USC Institute for Creative Technologies, USA)
Stacy Marsella (Northeastern University, USA)

Demo Chairs: demochairs@iva.acm.org
Stefán Ólafsson (Reykjavik University, Iceland)
Pablo Arias Sarah (University of Glasgow, UK)

Workshop Chairs:  workshopchairs@iva.acm.org
Beatrice Biancardi (LINEACT CESI, France)
Patrick Gebhard (DFKI Saarbrücken, Germany)

Proceedings Chairs: proceedingschairs@iva.acm.org
Thilina Latitharatne (Queen Mary University of London, UK)
Florian Pecune (University of Bordeaux, France)

Doctoral Consortium Chairs: doctoralconsortiumchairs@iva.acm.org
Hannes Högni Vilhjálmsson (Reykjavik University, Iceland)
Laura Hensel (University of Glasgow, UK)

Local Chairs: localchairs@iva.acm.org
Mary Ellen Foster (University of Glasgow, UK)

Sponsor Chairs: sponsorchair@iva.acm.org
Jonas Beskow (KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm University, Sweden)

Web Chairs:  webchair@iva.acm.org
Brian Ravenet (LISN-CNRS, Université Paris-Saclay, France)
Tanja Schneeberger (DFKI Saarbrücken, Germany)