[agents] Announcement: Intelligent Virtual Agents conference 2015 (IVA2015), August, Delft, The Netherlands

[Marieke Peeters]

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DATES & LOCATION
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- main conference: Wednesday 26 Aug – Friday 28 Aug 2015
- workshops: Tuesday 25 Aug 2015
- doctoral consortium: Monday 24 Aug 2015
- Science Centre, Delft, The Netherlands

CONFERENCE
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Intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) are interactive characters that exhibit human-like qualities and communicate with humans or with each other using natural human modalities such as facial expressions, speech and gesture. They are capable of real-time perception, cognition and action which allows them to participate in dynamic social environments.

IVA 2015 is an interdisciplinary annual conference and the main leading scientific forum for presenting research on modelling, developing and evaluating intelligent virtual agents with a focus on communicative abilities and social behavior. In addition to presentations on theoretical issues, the conference encourages the showcasing of working applications. Researchers from the fields of human-human and human-robot interaction are also encouraged to share work with a relevance to intelligent virtual agents.

SPECIAL TOPIC
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This year’s special topic is Social Training. Increasingly more research aims at utilizing potential benefits of using intelligent virtual agents in automated training systems in domains with a strong emphasis on the social dimension of human-human interaction. Examples of such training domains are:  negotiation, job interviewing, interrogation, aggression or conflict management, patient or customer conversation, but also social environments used for treatment of people with social anxiety or autism.  The conference will encourage contributions (workshops, paper, video, demo’s, posters, and keynotes) that address this special topic.

TOPICS OF INTEREST
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Design, Modeling and Evaluation of IVAs

-design criteria and design methodologies
-evaluation methodologies and user studies
-ethical considerations and social impact
-applicable lessons from other fields (e.g. robotics)
-improvisational or dramatic interaction
-dimensions of intelligence, cognition and behavior
-models of multimodal perception and action
-models of emotionally communicative behavior
-models of conversational behavior
-models of narrative and storytelling used by agents
-design of virtual actors
-theoretical foundations and formal models for virtual agents
-learned, evolved or emergent behavior in agents

Implementation and Applications of IVAs
-software engineering issues
-real-time integrated systems
-portability and reuse standards / measures to support interoperability
-specialized tools, toolkits and tool chains
-specialized modeling and animation technologies
-applications in games, education, art, etc.
-delivery platforms: desktop, single vs. multi-user, virtual or augmented or mixed reality, robots
-future or current experience in various fields, e.g.: Interactive narrative and story-telling, computer
games, art and entertainment, education and training, simulation and visualization


ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
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Willem-Paul Brinkman, Delft University of Technology
Joost Broekens, Delft University of Technology
Dirk Heylen, University of Twente

MORE INFORMATION
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Information about submission deadline, keynote speakers, workshop call will be announces later on. This information will also be made available on the conference website: iva2015.tudelft.nl<http://iva2015.tudelft.nl/>