[agents] CFP Affective Interaction with Avatars @ AML'15

[Maher Ben Moussa]

(Apologies for multiple posting)

Call for Research Papers
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"Affective Interaction with Avatars" workshop to be held in conjunction with the European Conference on Ambient Intelligence (AML'15). 11-13 November 2015 - Athens, Greece

Avatars, also known as Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs), have been successfully employed in several domains, including gaming, education, health, training etc. Recently, the domain of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) has also been active in incorporating avatars as a front-end interface for elderly oriented solutions and services. Avatars provide an intuitive and natural way for elderly users to interact with intelligent systems that offer services or help them with their daily activities.Since emotions play a fundamental role in human communication, within the scope of AAL, the affective capabilities an agent employs have strong impact on the perception of its intelligence, quality of interaction, and more importantly, on user engagement.  Affective interaction involves several aspects like the recognition of the user's affective state, based for example on speech and video processing, the computational modelling of the agent's affective state and behaviour, expression of affect via animated facial and/or bodily expressions, dialogue management which gracefully handles errors and interruptions, etc.Successfully addressing open challenges in these domains can increase the frequency and quality of interaction, leading to a better acceptance of the agents and, in general, of AAL solutions. Principles of affective interaction may be similarly applied to robot-based systems to gain similar benefits in the domain on Ambient Intelligence.

The aim of this workshop is to focus on research contributions related to affective interaction with avatars. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Affect recognition using different modalities, e.g. physiological signals, voice, facial expressions, and gestures
- Affect fusion from different modalities under different time constraints
- Advanced dialogue management for affective avatar interaction
- Computational models of moods, emotions, personalities and memory
- Affective and empathic behaviour in expressive avatars
- Evaluation studies and case studies from a point of view of practical applications

Important Dates
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Timely submission of the papers is critical to the success of the program. The procedures and timetable enumerated below will apply.

1. Deadline for submissions - July 25, 2015 (EXTENDED)
2. Notification to authors - August 15, 2015
3. Deadline for camera ready papers - September 1, 2015

Accepted papers will be published as an online CEUR Volume (see http://ceur-ws.org/ for further details), indexed in SCOPUS. Submissions should follow the publication policies of CEUR detailed http://ceur-ws.org/HOWTOSUBMIT.html.

Formatting Instructions
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Position papers (2 to 4 pages) must be written in English and submitted in PDF format. The AML'15 proceedings will be published by Springer and therefore all submissions should conform to the formatting instructions described in the "For Authors" webpage (http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0). In case your paper includes images or screenshots please ensure that you set image compression at 600dpi when you produce your PDF file.

Submission
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Papers must be submitted in electronic format (PDF) via the conference's EasyChair submission page. More details can be found on the workshop's website at http://www.miraculous-life.eu/ws-affinAccording to the Registration Regulation for AML'15, inclusion of papers in the Proceedings is conditional upon registration of at least one author per paper.

Organization
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Carsten Stockloew, Fraunhofer IGD, Germany
Sten Hanke, AIT Austrian Institute of Technology, Austria
Maher Ben Moussa, University of Geneva, Switzerland
Panayiotis Andreou, University of Cyprus, Cyprus
Christiana  Tsiourti, University of Geneva, Switzerland