[agents] [CFP] Final Call - ACM 20th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA 2020) (New Deadline)

[Pedro Sequeira]

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Call for Submissions (Open for resubmissions and new submissions!)

ACM 20th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents

Online Conference, October 19th-23rd 2020

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

iva20 at easychair.org
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NEW SUBMISSION DEADLINE (Resubmissions and new submissions, both Full
Papers and Extended Abstracts)

Second phase submission deadline: Sunday, August 9th, 2020 (23:59 UTC-12)
Note: this is a HARD DEADLINE, no further extensions will be made.

Submission page: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=iva20
Submission instructions: https://iva2020.psy.gla.ac.uk/submission/

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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. Due to the COVID-19
pandemic, it will be held as a series of moderated online panel
sessions with selected authors. All accepted Full Papers and Extended
Abstracts will be published in ACM proceedings ***

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). We
welcome and encourage the submission of early results and work in
progress as Extended Abstracts.

All submissions will be double-blind peer-reviewed by a group of
external expert reviewers. All accepted submissions will be published
in the ACM proceedings. Accepted Full Papers, and select Extended
Abstracts, will be included in moderated online sessions, spread out
across the conference week. Papers rejected at the first submission
round (deadline 15th of June) may be invited to submit a revision by
the second  submission round (deadline 3rd of August). Papers rejected
at the first submission round, without an invitation to revise and
resubmit, should not be resubmitted. However, the second submission is
open for brand new submissions.

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. Submissions
failing to adhere to these rules may be desk rejected.

- 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 available at:
https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template#h-latex-authors

- 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 as per the instructions in:
https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template#h-word-authors

IVA 2020 offers two submission tracks:

- Full Papers: 8 pages (including references)
- Extended Abstracts: 3 pages (including references)

All papers must be submitted in PDF-format.

- Supplementary material: IVA 2020 does not contemplate the upload of
supplementary material. If necessary to direct readers to supplemental
data, we encourage authors to host such material in a public
repository and add a link to it in the paper.

Second Round Resubmissions

If authors submitted a paper in the first submission round and *were
invited* by the IVA 2020 Program Chairs to make improvements and
resubmit (either to the same or a different track) on the second
round, please provide in the submission form the original submission
ID, as well as a response to how the reviewers’ comments and
suggestions were addressed in the revised manuscript.

New Submissions

New submissions are also welcome in this second submission round.
Please pick your track carefully as Full Papers will either be
accepted or rejected - there will be no “revise and resubmit” in this
second round.

Paper Categories

To help with the reviewing process, we ask authors to select a
category that best describes their submission. If more than one
category applies, authors should select the one that they believe
better represents the main contribution of the paper. The following
categories are available:

- Computational Model: the paper presents a novel computational model
addressing an aspect of agent design.
- Application: the paper presents a real-world application of virtual
agent technology.
- Experimental Study: the paper presents a human subject experimental study.
- Theory: the paper proposes new theoretical material on the subject of IVAs.
- Other: choose this option only when the paper does not fit any of
the above categories.

IMPORTANT DATES

- Second Submission Deadline: Sunday, August 9th, 2020 (23:59 UTC-12)
- Second Notification of acceptance: Wednesday, September 2nd, 2020
- Camera-Ready Submission: Wednesday, September 16, 2020 (23:59 UTC-12)
- Online Conference Dates: October 19th-23rd 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