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Workshop on Intelligent Virtual Agents (Virtual Agents 99)

		http://www.salford.ac.uk/cve/va99/
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One day workshop prior to and in Association with the UK VR SIG 99 Conference

		The Centre for Virtual Environments
			University of Salford,
		      Salford, United Kingdom

			13th September 1999

Preliminary Call for Papers
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The field of Virtual Agents is a new and emerging area that is starting to make its way out of research and into the commercial world. The area brings together two disciplines, the field of 
visualization covering areas such as 3D graphics, virtual reality, computer animation, and multimedia, and the field of agents, both within Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Artificial Life (ALIFE).

Only recently has the price and power of computers made virtual agents a viable option to explore scientifically. Despite being a relatively new field of research, large strides have been made in a 
short time. Lately there has been a marked increase in interest with virtual agents in diverse industries such as entertainment, education, engineering, and film.

At the 13th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI98), a very successful workshop was held on Intelligent Virtual Environments. Participants felt a follow-up workshop should be 
organised in 1999 and since a major theme had been that of Virtual Agents, this was chosen as the theme of the forthcoming workshop.

People researching virtual agents tend to come from either the visualization or agent community. The two communities have much to learn from each other, if wheels are not to be reinvented on 
both sides. This workshop aims to bring these two communities together to discuss the current state-of-the-art in virtual agents, together with leading international keynote speakers, and to 
create a roadmap for the future of this technology.
  
Topics of interest include (but not limited to)

* Virtual and physical agent interaction
* Augmented virtual agents
* Emotionally driven synthetic characters
* New tools and technologies for the building of virtual agents
* Human interaction with virtual agents (e.g. voice recognition) 
* Perception in virtual agents
* Intelligent virtual actors
* Novel applications of virtual agents 
* The use of virtual agents for training 
* Biologically inspired virtual agents 
* Virtual agents in shared worlds
* Virtual ecosystems


Paper Submission

If you are interested in contributing please send an extended abstract 1000 - 2000 words. Extended abstracts and final papers should be sent electronically, in Word, HTML or Postscript to: 
[log in to unmask] Final papers should be about 4000 words. The deadlines for submission are given below. 

Demonstrations and Exhibits  

An opportunity will exist for people to demonstrate their work. To give us time to organise the floor space and technical requirements we would like to be notified before the 6th August, contact 
us for details of resources available: [log in to unmask] 

Attendance

Anyone with an interest in virtual agents may attend - it is not necessary to submit a paper in order to attend but people who do will get priority. To encourage discussion and interaction there 
are a limited number of places, so early registration is recommended.

Registration

The registration fee will be £30 and will include attendance at the workshop on the 13th September, lunch, morning and afternoon tea/coffee, and a copy of the proceedings. It is not necessary to 
register for the UK VR-SIG on the 14th and 15th of September, if you only wish to attend the virtual agent workshop. 

Accommodation

Accommodation is available on site for those arriving before the workshop or those staying on for the UK VR-SIG. Details will follow.

Programme Committee
Ruth Aylett,		Centre for Virtual Environments, UK - Chair
Daniel Ballin,		Centre for Virtual Environments, UK
Marc Cavazza		University of Bradford, UK 
Dave Cliff,			Hewlett Packard Labs, Bristol, UK
Kerstin Dautenhahn,	University of Reading, UK
Chris Hand		Napier University, UK 
Mike Luck,			University of Warwick, UK
Divine Ndumu,		 BT Laboratories, UK
Paolo Petta,		Austrian Research Institute for AI, Austria
Peter Wavish,		Philips Research Labs, Redhill, UK
Mark Wells	Televirtual, 	Norwich, UK


Keynote Speaker
Professor Demetri Terzopoulos 
Department of Computer Science
University of Toronto

Professor Terzopoulos does pioneering work in artificial life, an emerging field that cuts across computer science and biological science. He devises computer models of animal locomotion, 
perception, behaviour, learning and intelligence. Demetri Terzopoulos and his students have created artificial fishes, virtual inhabitants of an underwater world simulated on a powerful computer. 
These autonomous, lifelike creatures swim, forage, eat and mate on their own. Demetri Terzopoulos has also done outstanding work on human facial modelling. He and his co-workers have 
produced what is widely recognised as the most realistic biomechanical model of the human face to date. Expressive synthetic faces are useful in entertainment, human-computer interaction, 
planning reconstructive facial surgery, automated face recognition, and teleconferencing systems. Demetri Terzopoulos is widely known as the inventor of deformable models, a family of shape 
modelling algorithms that have bridged the fields of computer vision and computer graphics and have opened up new avenues of research in medical imaging and computer-aided design. 

Audio / Visual

An overhead projector will be provided, as well as a TV-video (PAL-VHS) and laptops (PC and Mac) running PowerPoint. Please notify us prior the workshop if you need these. 

If you have any other hardware requirements please contact us, and we will try and accommodate them.

Important Dates 
Submission of Extended Abstracts	11th June 1999
Notification re: Extended Abstracts	16th July 1999
Proposals for Demonstrations/Exhibits	6th August 1999
Submission of camera-ready copy		20th August 1999
Deadline for registration			20th August 1999
Intelligent Virtual Agents workshop		13th September 1999
UK VR SIG Conference			14th - 15th September 1999

Publication
All contributions will be considered for later publication in a special journal issue, details of this will follow.

Contact Person and Further Details

Daniel Ballin, 
The Centre for Virtual Environments
Business House
University of Salford,
Salford
M5 4WT, UK	
Email: [log in to unmask]
Tel: +44-(0)161-295-2918 
Fax: +44-(0)161-295-2925

http://www.salford.ac.uk/cve/va99/




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