[humaine news] CFP: AAMAS 2010 Workshop on INTERACTING WITH ECAS AS VIRTUAL CHARACTERS

[Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Andre]

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

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 at 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 at tees.ac.uk

Catherine Pelachaud
CNRS – LTCI, Institut Télécom – Télécom, ParisTech, Paris, France,
Email: catherine.pelachaud at 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
Oliver Lemon, University of Edinburgh, UK
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, Finnland


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