First Call for Papers of the:

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