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CALL FOR PAPERS
IVA2001
Third International Workshop on
INTELLIGENT VIRTUAL AGENTS
<http://bermudas.ls.fi.upm.es/~iva01/>
September 11-12, 2001
Madrid, Spain
Keynote speakers: Daniel Thalmann, Jeff Rickel
The field of Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) is a new emerging
discipline that is growing in importance, both in the commercial
sector and in the research community. An IVA is an autonomous
embodied agent in an interactive graphical environment, usually 3D,
which draws on AI and ALife technology so as to interact
intelligently with its environment and with human users.
This is a multidisciplinary area that brings together Virtual
Environments, AI and ALife, HCI. It draws on fields such as graphics
and animation, autonomous agents, natural language generation and
recognition, planning, learning, cognitive science, user modelling
and many others. The explosive growth of the Internet and dropping
price and rising power of computers has made Intelligent Virtual
Agents a viable option to be explored scientifically.
Despite its relative novelty, this field of research is making rapid
progress, owing to its inherent attractiveness to diverse industries, such
as education, e-commerce, entertainment and computer games,
communication,
engineering and film and other media.
The origin of IVA'01 dates from a successful workshop on Intelligent
Virtual Environments held in Brighton at the 13th European Conference on
Artificial Intelligence (ECAI'98). This workshop was followed by a second
one held in Manchester in 1999 with the theme of Intelligent Virtual
Agents. This present third edition re-takes the baton of Manchester.
This workshop aims to bring all these 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 are not limited to:
===================================================
o Applications of Intelligent Virtual Agents
In Entertainment, Television, Movie Advertising, Media, Games
Industry
In Heritage, Training, and Tutoring systems Industry
In Medicine, Fashion, and Telecommunications
o Virtual Agent Sensors
Adaptive sensors, Synthetic vision
Virtual smell, virtual tactile, virtual audition
Nature and Robotic inspired virtual sensors
o Control Architectures for Autonomous Virtual Agents
Behavioural based architectures (subsumption etc.)
Deliberative based architectures (belief-desire-intention, etc.)
Hybrid architectures
Agent Collision Detection, Obstacle Avoidance, Path planning,
Learning
o Types of Virtual Agents
Autonomous and semi-autonomous
Virtual humans, Distributed Virtual Agents
Societies of Virtual Agents (inc. crowd behaviour)
Evolutionary, Pedagogical, Collaborative, and Socially
Intelligent Virtual Agents
Conversational Characters, Affect and Personality in life-like
characters
o Developing IVA's and HCI Issues
The role of Anthropomorphism, Embodiment, and Believability
Managing the direct manipulation of VR with indirect of an Agent
Speech Synthesis, Gesture, Lip Syncing, Facial expressions, etc
Natural Language and Speech recognition in Virtual Agents
Design methodologies and evaluation of Life-like characters
Toolkits and Tools for the Building of Virtual Agents
3D character Model generation (inc. Photorealistic scanning, 2D,
3D etc)
COMMITTEES:
===========
Conference Chair
Ruth Aylett - Centre for Virtual Environments, University of
Salford, UK
Daniel Ballin - Radical Multimedia Laboratory, BT exaCT, UK
Local Conference Chair
Angélica de Antonio - Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain
Local Organising Committee
Julia Clemente - Universidad de Alcalá, Spain
Pilar Herrero - Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain
Ricardo Imbert - Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain
Gonzalo Méndez - Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain
Jaime Ramírez - Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain
María Isabel Sánchez - Universidad Carlos III, Spain
Program Committee
Elisabeth André - DFKI - German Research Center for Artificial
Intelligence, Germany
Riccardo Antonini - Consorzio Roma Ricerche, Italy
Angélica de Antonio - Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain
Ruth Aylett - Centre for Virtual Environments, University of
Salford, UK
Norman I. Badler - University of Pennsylvania, USA
Daniel Ballin - Radical Multimedia Laboratory, BT exaCT, UK
Bruce Blumberg - MIT Media Lab, USA
Joanna Bryson- MIT AI Lab, USA
Justine Cassell - MIT Media Lab, USA
Marc Cavazza - University of Teeside, UK
Elisabeth Churchill - FX-PAL, USA
Dave Cliff - HP Labs Bristol, UK
Kerstin Dautenhahn - University of Hertfordshire, UK
Steve Grand - Cyberlife Research, UK
Ricardo Imbert - Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain
Brian Logan - University of Nottingham, UK
Mike Luck - University of Southampton, UK
Jan-Torsten Milde - University of Bielefeld, Germany
Ana Paiva - IST-Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal
Todd Papaioannou - DALi Inc, USA
Catherine Pelechaud - Università degli Studi di Roma "La
Sapienza", Italy
Paolo Petta - Austrian Research Institute for Artificial
Intelligence, Austria
Dave Roberts - University of Reading, UK
Ryohei Nakatsu - ATR Media Integration & Communications Research
Laboratories, Japan
Phoebe Sengers - GMD - Institute for Media Communication, Germany
Demetri Terzopoulos - New York University, USA
Keynote Speakers
Jeff Rickel - University of Southern California, USA
Daniel Thalmann - École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
PAPER SUBMISSION:
=================
Papers must be written in English. Only electronic Postscript, RTF or
Microsoft Word formats will be accepted.
If you are interested in contributing please send paper of no more
than 5000 words to: [log in to unmask]
All accepted papers will be published in the Springer Lecture Notes
in Computer Science and Lecture Notes in Artificial Inteligence
series (LNCS/LNAI)(http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/index.html)and
considered for later publication in a special journal issue. Details
of this will follow.
Accepted papers will have to be prepared according to the Springer
LNCS/LNAI Authors Instructions
(http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html), in order to be
published with the proper format.
DEMONSTRATIONS & EXHIBITS:
==========================
We stongly encourage you to demonstrate your work.
To give us time to organise the floor space and technical
requirements we would like to be notified before the 13th July.
Contact us for details at: [log in to unmask]
IMPORTANT DATES:
================
May 11, 2001 - Deadline for paper submission
June 8, 2001 - Notification of acceptance
July 6, 2001 - Deadline for camera-ready papers
July 13, 2001 - Proposals for demonstrations/exhibits
July 20, 2001 - Deadline for early registration
August 10, 2001 - Deadline for late registration
September 10-11, 2001 - IVA'01 workshop
ATTENDANCE & REGISTRATION:
==========================
To encourage discussion and interaction there are a limited number
of places, so early registration is recommended. Anyone with an
interest in virtual agents may attend - it is not necessary to submit a
workshop paper in order to attend but people who do will get priority.
Details about registration and location are available on the
workshop website.
SPONSORSHIP:
============
Intelligent Virtual Agents 2001 is offering the opportunity for
organisations to promote themselves by sponsoring part of IVA'01.
Sponsorship will ensure the highest visibility for the benefactor,
through the use of the sponsor's logo on conference material and
through appearance of the sponsor's name in references to the
workshop, both before and after the event.
Potential sponsors should get in touch with the contact person or
the local conference chair.
CONTACT PERSON:
===============
Angélica de Antonio
Facultad de Informática
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
Campus de Montegancedo, s/n
28660 Boadilla del Monte (Madrid)
Spain
e-Mail: [log in to unmask]
Tel: +34 913 366 925
Fax: +34 913 366 917
http://www.ls.fi.upm.es/udis/miembros/angelica/index_e.html
MORE INFORMATION is available at the IVA2001
website: http://bermudas.ls.fi.upm.es/~iva01/
