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    ============================================================
             GALA (Gathering of Animated Lifelike Agents)
                  at IVA 2008, 1-3 September, Tokyo
                   http://hmi.ewi.utwente.nl/gala/.
                        Call for Participation
     ============================================================

GALA IN A NUTSHELL
GALA is an annual festival to showcase the latest Animated Lifelike
Agents created by university students and academic or industrial
research groups. GALA was launched in 2005. GALA provides:
- the GALA Final event, to demonstrate the state-of-the-art in the
technology of virtual humans;
- the GALA Jury Award for student projects and the GALA Public Award for
any entry;
- the permanent GALA Gallery on the web with the best entries exhibited
for further study.

An international jury will select entries for the GALA Gallery, to be
presented live at the GALA Final.
 
GALA is the major event for demonstrating your interactive virtual
humans, exploiting techniques in real-time graphics, animation,
multimodal interaction, agents, emotion modeling, dialog management and
related areas. The quality and interactive capabilities of the animated
lifelike agent are to be presented in a short movie (see Submission
details). GALA is different from and complementary to scientific
conferences where demonstrations are at most illustrations of talks,
often not included in proceedings and thus hard to reproduce. GALA
specifically encourages university students at all levels to submit
their work prepared in a shorter time, preferably as a project related
to their university curriculum, unlike the output of larger-scale
research presented at conferences.
 
PARTICIPANTS TRACKS
1. Student
Students from any university, individually or as a group, may submit in
this track. For each student submission a supervisor should be named,
who can be contacted should the jury want to clarify some issues
concerning originality of the work or status of the authors. The works
submitted in this track must be prepared within a year prior to
submission, preferably as a student project related to a university
curriculum. However, animated lifelike agents created in the context of
a larger research project or industrial application are welcome too, as
well as ones made on their developer's own initiative, i.e. without any
background context. In the first case, the contribution of the student
to the project as well as the earlier results built upon should be
specifically emphasized.
 
2. Other
In this track work from academic institutions and industry, as well as
from multi-party national or international projects, is welcome.

All submissions are candidates for the short list of entries, to be
presented at the final show and to be included in the repository.
Submission categories and formal requirements (see below) are identical
for both tracks.
 
SUBMISSION CATEGORIES
1. Race Reporter
The Race Reporter is a talking head, reporting live on an ongoing horse
race. The challenge is to produce a believable and engaging reporter,
both with respect to the content and the presentation style, conveying
the increase of tension during the race. The Race Reporter should be
able to report in real time on any race generated by the Race Simulator,
software provided via the GALA web page.

2. Animated Lifelike Agent Application
The animated lifelike agent is developed for an application. The movie
shows the animated lifelike agent in the application context. The points
of interest are novelty of application, smoothness of interaction,
appeal, general design, consistency, etc.

3. Animated Lifelike Agent Creation
In this category, a special feature (e.g. lip-sync, body design, facial
animation, hand gesturing) of the animated lifelike agent is to be
presented. The points of interest are modules or tools used to create
certain aspects of animated lifelike agents, in an easy way and
convincing quality.

In the last two categories, the embodiment (head/full body,
realistic/cartoon-like), the cast of role (e.g.  information provider
for the user, actor in interactive drama, educator, chatbot) and the
media (e.g. Virtual reality, PC, palmtop, mobile phone) are open. Novel
application domains, designs and media are encouraged. The only
restriction is that the animated lifelike agent must have reactive
and/or interactive capabilities, as opposed to virtual characters
animated for a single purpose (e.g. CG animation for a film, direct
usage of Motion Capture). Physical robots are not eligible for GALA.

SUBMISSION FORMAT
The animated lifelike agent is to be documented and shown in a movie of
2-4 minutes, in the first round.  The international jury will invite the
entries for the second round, to be demonstrated at the GALA Final in
public.

The submission deadline is *1 June 2008*.

For further details, and submissions of previous years, see
http://hmi.ewi.utwente.nl/gala/.

ORGANIZERS
Chairs
Zsofia Ruttkay (University of Twente, The Netherlands) Yukiko Nakano
(Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, Japan)

Steering committee
Elisabeth Andre (University of Augsburg, Germany) Michael Kipp (DFKI,
Germany) Tsai-Yen Li (National Chengchi University, Taiwan) Jean-Claude
Martin (LIMSI-CNRS, France) Stacy Marsella, (USC Information Science
Institute, USA) Anton Nijholt (University of Twente, The Netherlands)
Igor Pandzic (University of Zagreb, Croatia) Helmut Prendinger (National
Institute of Informatics, Japan)

Technical assistant
Hendri Hondorp (University of Twente, The Netherlands)

Contact
Zsofia Ruttkay by mail: zsofiATcs.utwente.nl

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