[agents] Humor in Intelligent Environments: Special Session and Workshop @ INTETAIN 2014

[A.Nijholt at utwente.nl]

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Call for Contributions
Special Session, Panel and Workshop on "Facilitating Spontaneous Humor"

Held in conjunction with INTETAIN 2014, 6th International Conference on Intelligent
Technologies for Interactive Entertainment, that will take place in Chicago, United States,
July 9-11, 2014. http://www.intetain.org/2014/show/home
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Humor researchers, game designers, human-computer interaction researchers, interactive media
researchers, comedy writers, and artists are invited to contribute to this event.

***TOPICS***
* Generating humorous events and potentially humorous situations in environments equipped
with sensors and actuators and inhibited by humans, virtual agents and/or social robots.
These environments include videogames, serious games, and ambient intelligence environments.
* Humor modelling in verbal and nonverbal human-human exchanges that can help to understand
how to create humorous events and situations in virtual worlds, sensor-equipped worlds and
videogames; obviously, we can learn from creating verbal and nonverbal humor in real world
and comedy situations.
* Designing virtual and physical agents that verbally and nonverbally engage in humorous
human-agent dialogues or agent-agent dialogues.
* Corpora collection of in-game and meta-game interactions; annotating of humorous
interactions and machine learning for detecting humor in interactions, dialogue and text.

***SUBMISSIONS***
We invite submissions for a Special Session on Facilitating Spontaneous Humor during the
main INTETAIN 2014 conference. Papers have to follow the general publication guidelines for
INTETAIN 2014 papers: see http://www.intetain.org/2014/show/authors-kit . Accepted papers
will appear in the INTETAIN 2014 Springer proceedings. Authors have to register for the
conference in order to have their papers included in the proceedings. In addition to the
Special Session we plan to have a one-day or one-afternoon pre-conference workshop and a
panel during the workshop or the conference. Workshop papers (maximum length 4 pages) should
also follow the INTETAIN author guidelines. All papers will be peer-reviewed. For submission
information contact a.nijholt at utwente.nl<mailto:a.nijholt at utwente.nl> .

***IMPORTANT DATES***
February 20th 2014: Deadline for Session and Workshop papers
March 20th 2014: Acceptance notification
April 15th 2014: Camera-ready submission

***BACKGROUND AND AIMS***
Humor is important in our daily activities. Although we sometimes may tell jokes and listen
to them, most of the humor we experience is in conversations, in behavioral activity and in
actions and situations in general. And, unlike the joke telling and listening experience, in
humor that appears spontaneously, we play an active role in letting this humor come into
existence. We assess a situation and decide whether it contains the elements to construct a
humorous remark and whether it is appropriate to generate such a remark. We assess a
situation and we decide whether our behavior or a next activity should have a humorous
effect or whether our behavior and activity should allow someone else to introduce a
humorous act. This spontaneous humor depends on context, participants, and history of
activities and interactions.

Today, sensor-equipped environments can be designed to sense and interpret human activity
and interaction. Intelligent environments can interpret and support human-human interaction.
Intelligent environments can also be inhabited by social (virtual) agents and by social
robots. These environments and their artificial inhabitants can play an active role in
generating (potential) humorous situations and interactions. Actuators can make (unexpected
and incongruous) changes to the environment. The environment can distribute knowledge about
what is going on or can be done to its virtual and physical agents. They can then play a
role in generating incongruous situations and interactions. Some autonomy can be embedded in
these agents.

In contrast, when we look at humorous texts, a movie or a comedy, the humorous situations
and interactions (dialogue) are constructed in advance. We, the readers, the audience
members, don't play an active role. Between the sensor-equipped physical environments and
media such as texts, stage performances and movies we can position virtual and augmented
reality worlds that simulate aspects of the real world, for example, for training situations
(serious games), persuasive fitness exercises, interactive art applications, or applications
that require us to interact in verbal and nonverbal ways in order to meet entertaining or
educational challenges presented to us. These virtual and augmented worlds allow
interaction, but the interaction is guided and controlled by the application. This is not
different from what we encounter in videogames, although in the traditional videogames we
only see mouse, keyboard and joystick interaction possibilities.

Humor appears in many popular videogames, whether it is in a game such as Grand Theft Auto
(GTA) or Portal. Humor is available in dialogues between game characters, comments on a gamer's
Behavior and actions, incongruous characters, jokes and incongruous introductions in cut scenes,
situations that challenge the gamer by employing non-Euclidean geometry or unusual physics
(as we often see in cartoon movies) or humor is available in a meta-channel of a multi-user
role playing game that allows gamers to employ textual or speech chat in order to discuss
strategies, to negotiate or to comment. It will be interesting (and also the aim of this special session
and workshop) to compare the possibility of designed humor in these game and virtual reality
environments and the facilitation of humor creation in sensor-equipped physical environments, with
existing and traditional ideas of humor creation in the physical world, in conversations, in texts, and in
other media.