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Workshop on Interacting with ECAs as Virtual Characters
to take place during
9th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2010)
10-14 May 2010, Toronto, Canada
http://mm-werkstatt.informatik.uni-augsburg.de/AAMAS-ECA-10.html
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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

Organizers:
* Prof. Dr. Elisabeth André, Augsburg University
* Prof. Dr. Marc Cavazza, University of Teesside
* Prof. Dr. Catherine Pelachaud, LTCI, TELECOM ParisTech

Contact:
Prof. Dr. Elisabeth André: andre@informatik.uni-augsburg.de

Important Deadlines:
* FEBRUARY 10, 2010 - Submission deadline
* MARCH 5, 2010 - Workshop paper acceptance notification
* MARCH 12, 2010 – Camera-ready copy
* MAY 10 or MAY 11, 2010 – Workshop