SECOND WORKSHOP CALL FOR PAPERS

ICMI-2012 Workshop on Speech and Gesture Production in Virtually and Physically Embodied Conversational Agents

URL: http://robotics.usc.edu/~icmi

CONFERENCE: 14th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI-2012)
LOCATION: DoubleTree Suites, Santa Monica, California, USA

IMPORTANT DATES:
* Intent to submit: Monday, June 4, 2012
* Submission deadline: Monday, June 25, 2012
* Notification: Monday, August 13, 2012
* Camera-ready deadline: Monday, September 10, 2012
* Workshop: Friday, October 26, 2012

DESCRIPTION:
This full day workshop aims to bring together researchers from the embodied conversational agent (ECA) and sociable robotics communities to spark discussion and collaboration between the related fields. The focus of the workshop will be on co-verbal behavior production — specifically, synchronized speech and gesture — for both virtually and physically embodied platforms. It will elucidate the subject in consideration of aspects regarding planning and realization of multimodal behavior production. Topics discussed will highlight common and distinguishing factors of their implementations within each respective field. The workshop will feature a panel discussion with experts from the relevant communities, and a breakout session encouraging participants to identify design and implementation principles common to both virtually and physically embodied sociable agents.

TOPICS:
Under the focus of speech-gesture-based multimodal human-agent interaction, the workshop invites submissions describing original work, either completed or still in progress, related to one or more of the following topics:
* Computational approaches to:
- Content and behavior planning, e.g., rule-based or probabilistic models
- Behavior realization for virtual agents or sociable robots
* From ECAs to physical robots: potential and challenges of cross-platform approaches
* Behavior specification languages and standards, e.g., FML, BML, MURML
* Speech-gesture synchronization, e.g., open-loop vs. closed-loop approaches
* Situatedness within social/environmental contexts
* Feedback-based user adaptation
* Cognitive modeling of gesture and speech

SUBMISSIONS:
Please send your intent to submit to icmi2012ws.speech.gesture@gmail.com by Monday, June 4, 2012.

Workshop contributions should be submitted via e-mail in the ACM publication style to icmi2012ws.speech.gesture@gmail.com in one of the following formats:
* Full paper (5-6 pages, PDF file)
* Short position paper (2-4 pages, PDF file)
* Demo video (1-3 minutes, common file formats, e.g., AVI or MP4) including an extended abstract (1-2 pages, PDF file)

If a submission exceeds 10MB, it should be made available online and a URL should be provided instead.

Submitted papers and abstracts should conform to the ACM publication style; for templates and examples, follow the link: http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html.

Accepted papers will be included in the workshop proceedings in ACM Digital Library; video submissions and accompanying abstracts will be published on the workshop website. Contributors will be invited to give either an oral or a video presentation at the workshop.

CONTACT:
* Workshop Questions and Submissions (icmi2012ws.speech.gesture@gmail.com)
* Ross Mead (rossmead@usc.edu)
* Maha Salem (msalem@cor-lab.uni-bielefeld.de)

WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS:
* Ross Mead (University of Southern California)
* Maha Salem (Bielefeld University)

PROGRAM COMMITTEE:
* Dan Bohus (Microsoft Research)
* Kerstin Dautenhahn (University of Hertfordshire)
* Jonathan Gratch (USC Institute for Creative Technologies)
* Alexis Heloir (German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence)
* Takayuki Kanda (ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories)
* Jina Lee (Sandia National Laboratories)
* Stacy Marsella (USC Institute for Creative Technologies)
* Maja Matarić (University of Southern California)
* Louis-Philippe Morency (USC Institute for Creative Technologies)
* Bilge Mutlu (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
* Victor Ng-Thow-Hing (Honda Research Institute USA)
* Catherine Pelachaud (TELECOM ParisTech)