[agents] Call for Submissions: ACM 20th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents

[Stacy Marsella]

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Call for Submissions

ACM 20th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents 

September 9-12th 2020 University of Glasgow, Scotland

https://iva2020.gla.ac.uk/

iva20 at easychair.org

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SUBMISSION DATES
Papers: Sunday 5th April 2020 (23:59 UTC-12)
Extended Abstracts: Sunday 24th May 2020 (23:59 UTC-12)

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2020 Intelligent Virtual Agents 
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Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA) Annual Conference is the premier international event for interdisciplinary research on the design, application, and evaluation of Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) with a specific focus on the ability to socially interact.

*** IVA 2020 will be the 20th Annual Conference. It will be held in Glasgow, Scotland, 9- 12th September 2020. ***

IVAs are interactive characters that exhibit human-like qualities including communicating using natural human modalities such as facial expressions, speech and gesture. IVAs are also capable of real-time perception, cognition, emotion and action that allows them to participate in dynamic social situations. 

IVA 2020 aims to showcase cutting-edge research on the design, application, and evaluation of IVAs, as well as the basic research underlying the technology that supports human-agent interaction such as social perception, dialog modeling, and social behavior planning. We also welcome submissions on central theoretical issues, uses of virtual agents in psychological research and showcases of working applications.

IVA 2020 offers two submission tracks: Papers (8 pages, including references) and Extended Abstracts (3 pages, including references).

All submissions will be double-blind peer-reviewed by external expert reviewers. All accepted submissions will be published in the proceedings. Accepted papers will be presented at a talk. Accepted extended abstracts will be presented as a talk or a poster, depending on the outcome of the review process.

SCOPE AND LIST OF TOPICS

IVA invites submissions on a broad range of topics, including but not limited to:

Agent design and modeling of:
- Cognition
- Emotion (including personality and cultural differences)
- Socially communicative behavior (e.g., of emotions, personality traits)
- Conversational behavior
- Social perception
- Machine learning approaches to agent modeling
- Approaches to realizing adaptive behavior 
- Models informed by theoretical and empirical research from psychology

Multimodal interaction:
- Verbal and nonverbal behavior coordination
- Face-to-face communication skills
- Engagement
- Managing co-presence and interpersonal relation
- Multi-party interaction
- Data driven multimodal modeling

Social agent architectures:
- Design criteria and design methodologies
- Engineering of real-time human-agent interaction
- Standards / measures to support interoperability
- Portability and reuse
- Specialized tools, toolkits and tool chains

Evaluation methods and studies:
- Evaluation methodologies and user studies
- Ethical considerations and societal impact
- Applicable lessons across fields (e.g. between robotics and virtual agents)
- Social agents as a means to study and model human behavior

Applications:
- Applications in education, skills training, health, counseling, games, art, etc.
- Virtual agents in games and simulations
- Social agents as tools in psychology
- Migration between platforms

SPECIAL IVA 2020 TOPIC: 
Exploring Connections between Computer Science, Robotics and Psychology.

Across computer science, robotics, psychology and the commercial world, there has been a rapid growth in the research, development and application of artificial social agents. Computer scientists and roboticists are researching graphics-based and physical social agents. Psychologists and neuroscientists are using these artifacts in laboratory experiments in order to study our interaction with them as well as to use them as confederates in the study of human behavior. Companies are actively developing similar technologies. However, these communities too rarely interact even though there are close synergies between psychology, the study of human behavior, and artificial social agents, the engineering of human behavior. The design of an artificial social agent involves the formalization of theories and data about human behavior, integration of resulting models into an agent and evaluation of its behavior, leveraging techniques derived from psychology. Each of these steps can in return be of fundamental value to psychological research. For example, formalization and integration forces one to concretely specify theoretical constructs and thereby expose hidden assumptions and gaps in theories. IVA 2020’s Special Topic provides an invitation to researchers and developers across disciplines to share their work on the challenges and uses of social agent research, in the hope to further trans-disciplinary collaboration.


INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS

Paper submissions should be anonymous and prepared in the "ACM Standard" format, more specifically the "SigConf" format.
- The LaTeX template for the "ACM Standard"/"SigConf" format can be found inside the official 2017 ACM Master article template package. Please use the most recent version (1.65) available at: 
https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template
- The "ACM Standard" Microsoft Word template is currently not part of the downloadable package as the ACM is currently revising it to improve accessibility of resulting PDF-documents. Please use the "Interim Word Template" instead: https://www.acm.org/binaries/content/assets/publications/word_style/interim-template-style/interim-layout.docx

IVA 2020 accepts two types of submissions:
- Full papers: 8 pages (including references)
- Extended abstracts: 3 pages (including references)
All papers must be submitted in PDF-format.

Important Dates:
- Papers 
---> Submission Deadline: Sunday 5th April 2020 (23:59 UTC-12)
---> Notification of acceptance: 15th May, 2020
- Extended Abstracts 
---> Submission Deadline: Sunday 24th May 2020 (23:59 UTC-12)
---> Notification of acceptance: 21st June, 2020

CONFERENCE ORGANIZERS

Conference Chairs:
- Stacy Marsella, University of Glasgow
- Rachael Jack, University of Glasgow

Program Chairs:
- Hannes Vilhjalmsson, Reykjavik University
- Pedro Sequeira, SRI International
- Emily Cross, University of Glasgow
Contact: iva20 at easychair.org

Workshop/Demonstration Organization Chairs:
- Lucile Callebert, University of Glasgow
- Florian Pecune, University of Glasgow
Contact: workshopsdemos.iva2020 at gmail.com

Web Site
- Amol Deshmukh, University of Glasgow

Doctoral Consortium
- Jonathan Gratch, ICT/USC

Treasurer
- Catherine Pelachaud, CNRS

Publicity Chair
- Mary Ellen Foster, University of Glasgow

Volunteer Coordinator: 
- Carolyn Saund, University of Glasgow

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