[agents] [XRIA24 at ECAI24] eXtended Reality & Intelligent Agents Workshop, DL extended to June 15

[Viviana Mascardi]

[Apologies for cross and multiple postings]

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XRIA24: First Workshop on "eXtended Reality & Intelligent Agents"
Co-located with ECAI2024
Santiago de Compostela, Spain, October 20, 2024
Conference website: https://sites.google.com/view/xria2024/home-page
Submission deadline :    June 15, 2024 (EXTENDED)

The recent advent of the Metaverse, the market expansion of the game 
industry, the growing success of virtual and augmented reality in 
research, training, education, and rehabilitation, the need for 
realistic simulations of complex scenarios, all show that the 
non-physical reality where people may meet, play, learn, is becoming 
more and more important in our daily lives. To make the non-physical 
reality environments/experience engaging, entertaining, and useful for 
simulation and training purposes, it should be populated by virtual 
humans (characters animated by the system) that, in many cases, should 
interact with avatars (characters acting as representatives or proxies 
of humans) in a believable, smooth, and rewarding way. Virtual humans 
are named differently depending on the context: non-player characters in 
the game context, AI avatars in the metaverse, etc. Whatever the name, 
in order to be realistic and to reach the goal for which they were 
designed, they should be autonomous, reactive, and social, and they 
should exhibit intelligent behavior. In other words, they should be 
intelligent software agents.

The purpose of the eXtended Reality & Intelligent Agents workshop, at 
its first edition this year, is to bring together researchers, 
engineers, and practitioners interested in exploring the role of 
intelligent agents in eXtended Reality (XR, that is, virtual, augmented, 
and mixed reality), and vice versa, embracing a multidisciplinary 
perspective. The workshop welcomes papers that propose architectures, 
methodologies, and tools for integrating intelligent agents and XR 
systems, as well as already developed case studies and technologies, and 
more visionary proposals.

== Submission Guidelines, Proceedings and Special Issue ==

The workshop welcomes contributions that would allow us to solicit the 
discussion and brainstorming about any relevant aspect related to 
intelligent agents and multi-agent systems and Extended Reality.

The workshop will exploit the “Review Transfer Option” offered by ECAI: 
furthermore, authors of rejected papers can directly submit their work, 
if in line with the XRIA topics (see Important Dates later on, Second 
round of submissions).

= We plan to not have formal proceedings but to publish accepted papers 
on the workshop website =  (or linking them from arxiv or any other 
archival repository, as preferred by the authors).
Some days after the acceptance, selected accepted papers will be invited 
to submit an extension of the workshop paper to a Special Issue on SN 
Computer Science (https://link.springer.com/journal/42979). Specific 
dates for the SI will be provided soon, but an indicative date for the 
deadline is the end of November 2024, so that authors will have more 
than 4 months from the notification date to prepare their SI paper.

In this line, constructive reviews will be provided, so that authors of 
accepted papers can prepare their presentation and discussion in the 
best way, and also take advantage of them to prepare the extended 
version of the paper for the SI, if invited to submit it.

The manuscript should use the ECAI LaTeX template. Please refer to our 
website for detailed information regarding the submission: 
https://sites.google.com/view/xria2024/submissions

== Important Dates ==

- Standard submission dates (initial round of submission):

Abstract (not mandatory, but strongly appreciated): 1 June 2024 (EXTENDED)
Submission deadline: 15 June 2024 (EXTENDED)
Notification: 18 July 2024

- Review Transfer Option dates (second round of submission, for rejected 
ECAI papers only):

Invitation from the workshop chairs: between the 4 and 10 of July 2024
Submission deadline: 11 July 2024
Notification: 18 July 2024

- Camera Ready (for informal publication on the workshop website): 14 
September 2024

- Registration deadline (please check the ECAI website): ECAI website, 
https://www.ecai2024.eu/

== List of Topics ==

Relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

= Integration of Agents and Multiagent systems and techniques into XR 
systems =

- Cognitive Agents for XR Avatars
- Interaction between agents and humans through virtual worlds
- Pedestrian and Crowd simulations in XR systems
- Autonomous and intelligent XR avatars
- Ambient Intelligent systems and XR
- Methodologies, platforms, tools and libraries for integrating MASs 
into XR platforms

= XR for agents and MAS =

- Exploiting virtual worlds as MAS environments
- Perception, locomotion and navigation of agents into XR environments
- Filling the gap between humans and virtual agents thanks to XR
- Exploiting XR simulation for Human & MAS experiments
- Exploiting XR simulation for Human & Robots experiments
- Methodologies, platforms, tools and libraries for integrating XR
   into MASs

= More general aspects =

- Conversational agents and XR
- Learning agents/avatars in the XR
- Ethical concerns with Virtual Agents
- Software Engineering aspects (testing, V&V) related to the
   integration of MAS and XR systems
- Any topic related to the integration/exploitation of MAS and XR

== Chairs ==

Daniela Briola, DISCO, University of Milano Bicocca, Italy
Yan Feng, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Viviana Mascardi, DIBRIS, University of Genova, Italy

== Contact ==

All questions should be emailed to Daniela Briola, 
daniela.briola at unimib.it, Yan Feng, Y.Feng at tudelft.nl, and Viviana 
Mascardi, viviana.mascardi at unige.it

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