WORKSHOP ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PAPERS

Embodied Conversational Characters as Individuals
http://www.vhml.org/workshops/AAMAS2003/

AAMAS 2003 Full Day Workshop Proposal
http://www.aamas-conference.org/


DESCRIPTION
Embodied conversational agents are synthetic characters that resemble
humans not only in their physical appearance, but also in their
behaviour with more or less the communicative characteristics of real
persons. They are gaining much interest, both as mediums to visualize
models of human communication, and as interfaces in different
applications. The first steps have been taken in the direction of
expressive ECAs, by endowing them with the capability of showing
emotions. Subtle issues such as the impact of social role and
personality have also been addressed. Non-verbal signals have been used
to accompany speech to make a virtual human more expressive and
believable, but, these works concentrated on modeling the psychological,
social and communicative aspects of emotional and cognitive state.
Usually the presentational issues are not dealt with as a research
topic, but as a practical task for an animator, often only to make a
specific application or demonstrator. Moreover, most of the agents
created so far are generic: it is difficult to differentiate them by the
way they move, answer, react… It can be said that most of the time, they
all ‘come from the one mould’.

WORKSHOP AIMS
The aim of this workshop is to define the theoretical and pragmatic
basis for the creation of individual ECAs. Individuality is defined by
several factors including personality, culture, emotion coping
behaviour, gender, social role and so on. It may be expressed on all
channels of communication, from the choice of words, to the voicing, to
the gesturing style and so on. In addition to the ‘look’ of the agent,
the creation of an individual agent should be approached from all
fronts: linguistic, intonation, vocal, facial expression, gaze, arm and
hand gesture, body movement. But the creation of such an agent requires
the extension of the common specification of what the agent will say and
which multi-signals will accompany the speech. One needs to specify
parameters of expressiveness of the meaning to be conveyed (strong vs
weak, gracious vs clumsy…). Moreover, some mechanism should be given to
link these parameters to particular gait or style the agent moves and
talks. Apart from all the problems already established in the creation
of ECAs (model of personality, emotion, social context…), one has to
look at what are the necessary parameters and aspects to define
expressiveness (strength, amplitude, speed, jerkiness of a gesture but
also frequency, repetitiveness of a gesture) as well as to define a
particular agent (the preferred hand gesture, speech and gaze pattern,
the way of moving…).

The purpose of this full-day workshop is to bring together researchers
and developers of embodied conversational characters to exchange ideas
and experiences on the various aspects involved in the creation of
individualistic agents:
- linguistic
- speech (voice, intonation)
- cognitive, personality and emotion models
- nonverbal communication
- animation
- look
- dialogue capabilities and social interaction with other
individualistic agents

MAJOR TOPICS
Issues to be addressed:
- identification of the factors influencing expressiveness and
individuality; the factors may come from linguistics, speech, emotion,
personality, gesture, social relation and/or dialogue capabilities.
- description, parameterisation, representation of such values;
- evaluation of a particular representation of individualism – what are
the useful features; what are the limitations; in how far are original
requirements met ?

STRUCTURE
The workshop will feature a mix of presentations, demonstrations, and
discussion rounds. The presentations could cover one of the several
themes of the workshop and should be oriented toward:
- description of the parameters defining the
expressiveness/individuality of an agent with a brief description of
application area, including the type of agent(s) to be achieved and the
research goals.
- pointers, such as on-line demos or videos, to actual working examples
that demonstrate the creation of such agents.

SUBMISSION FORMAT
Since we aim at a highly focused event on the aspect of individuality
and expressiveness of ECAs, we kindly ask authors to prepare their
submissions according to the following structure:

1. Brief description of application area character type(s) and research
goals;
2. Description of their requirements for an individual agent;
3. Description of the actual aspects of individualism being used in
their system(s);
4. Report on experiences and on evaluation studies with the creation of
a particular agent – what are the useful features, what are the
necessary steps toward such a creation;
5. Other aspects relevant to the topic of this workshop

Papers length should be 4 to 8 pages long (using 11pt, single space, all
margins of 2cm) and should be accompanied as much as possible with an
animation or URL’s showing multimedia content (actual systems,
screenshots, animations, etc) describing the work presented. Every paper
submitted will be reviewed by at least 2 reviewers from the program
committee.
Submissions should be emailed to Catherine Pelachaud
([log in to unmask]) in PS or PDF format by April 15th,
2003. If email is not possible, please sent two copies of your paper to
(though, email is much preferred):

Catherine Pelachaud
IUT of Montreuil
University of Paris 8
140 rue de la Nouvelle France
93100 Montreuil
France

Note: Workshop participants will be required to register for the Second
International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents & Multi-Agent
Systems main conference (http://www.aamas-conference.org/)

TIMELINE
April 15 Deadline for submissions of contributions
May 15 Submission of camera ready contribution for the workshop notes
July 14 or 15 Workshop

ORGANISATION COMMITTEE
Catherine Pelachaud, IUT of Montreuil - University of Paris 8, France
Andrew Marriott, Curtin University of Technology, Australia
Zsofia Ruttkay, CWI, Holland

PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Jan Allbeck (USA)
Elisabeth Andre (G)
Norman Badler (USA)
Simon Beard (AU)
Jonas Beskow (SE)
Kees van Deemter (UK)
Doug De Carlo (USA)
Stephane Donikian (F)
Sylvie Gibet (F)
Mitsuru Ishizuka (J)
Fabio Lavagetto (I)
Brigitte Krenn (AT)
Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann (SW)
Shigeo Morishima (J)
Ana Paiva (P)
Isabella Poggi (I)
Helmut Prendinger (J)
Jeff Rickel (USA)
Thomas Rist (DE)
Candace Sidner (USA)
Matthew Stone (USA)
John Stallo (AU)
Daniel Thalmann (SW)