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<beskow_(on)_kth.se>

(apologies for cross-posting)

First Call for Papers:

Workshop on Real-time Conversations with Virtual Agents (RCVA)
Santa Cruz, CA, September 15, 2012
http://wwwhome.ewi.utwente.nl/~koki/rcva/ (in conjunction with
IVA 2012)

Organizers: Jens Edlund - KTH Iwan de Kok - University of Twente
Ronald Poppe - University of Twente David Traum - USC Institute
for Creative Technologies

Outline: Engaging in face-to-face conversations with virtual
agents requires real-time behavior interpretation, modeling and
generation. Advances in sensor technology, dialog management and
animation bring within reach the goal of talking with virtual
agents. And still, challenges remain in each of these areas, and
in their combination into fully responsive, real-time interactive
systems.

What are the implications of striving for real-time interaction
for the following topics:

- Behavior interpretation: sensors such as microphones, cameras,
  gaze trackers and Kinects are used to observe human
  conversational partners. Analyzing sensor data and interpreting
  the human's behavior, both verbally and non-verbally, in
  real-time is challenging. We specifically focus on
  (incremental) feature extraction, (multi-modal) social signal
  processing and innovative real-time approaches to behavior
  analysis and understanding. In addition to conventional aspects
  of face-to-face dialogs, we also welcome work on real-time
  capturing of aspects such as breathing and laughter.

- Behavior modeling: conversations between humans and virtual
  agents require proper modeling of the dialog, including
  turn-taking mechanisms, feedback and grounding. We solicit
  papers that address challenges in this area, with a focus on
  real-time face-to-face conversations between one or multiple
  humans and one or multiple virtual agents. In addition, online
  modeling of a virtual agent's communicative behavior, in terms
  of personality and role, is of interest.

- Interactive systems: behavior interpretation, modeling and
  generation can be combined into real-time interactive systems
  that allow us to have conversations with virtual agents. Papers
  on specification and implementation of such fully interactive
  systems are within the scope of the workshop, as are conceptual
  frameworks or toolboxes for their development. Adaptation to
  the human conversational partner and the evaluation of
  interactive systems are of particular interest.

- Co-presence: in fields such as augmented reality, the border
  between the virtual and the physical has long been blurred.
  With recent technological developments, e.g. back-projected or
  actuated robot heads and virtual reality displays, the
  distinction has also become fuzzy when it comes to
  conversational agents. Co-present face-to-face communication
  between a human and an agent requires, in some sense, that they
  exist in the same reality. Papers examining how human-avatar
  conversations bridge this interface between the virtual and the
  physical are welcome.

Submission: We invite authors to submit short papers (6-8 pages)
in the style of IVA (Springer LNCS,
http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs/lncs+authors). Papers can
be submitted through the conference system at
https://www.softconf.com/c/iva2012/ Please indicate clearly that
you submit the paper to the RCVA workshop.

Publication: All accepted papers will appear online on the
website of the workshop. Authors of selected papers will be
invited to submit extended versions of their work to be published
in a special issue of the Springer Journal on Multimodal User
Interfaces (JMUI,
http://www.springer.com/computer/hci/journal/12193).

Important dates:
- Submission deadline: July 9, 2012
- Notification of acceptance: August 15, 2012
- Camera ready deadline: August 31, 2012
- Main conference: September 12-14, 2012
- Workshop: September 15, 2012

Program committee:
- Jonas Beskow - KTH
- Dan Bohus - Microsoft Research
- Frédéric Delauney - Plymouth University
- Joakim Gustafson - KTH
- Dirk Heylen - University of Twente
- Hung-Hsuan Huang - Ritsumeikan University
- Kristiina Jokinen - University of Helsinki
- Stefan Kopp - Bielefeld University
- Louis-Philippe Morency - USC Institute for Creative
  Technologies
- Yukiko Nakano - Seikei University
- David Schlangen - Bielefeld University
- Nigel Ward - University of Texas

--
Jonas Beskow, Associate professor KTH Centre for Speech
Technology Lindstedstvägen 24 10044 Stockholm

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