WORKSHOP ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PAPERS
Balanced Perception and Action in ECAs
In
conjunction with
AAMAS 2004 Workshop
http://www.aamas-conference.org/
Conversation
is by no means a sequence of one-way message sending, with the role of
participants alternating between that of “sender” and “receiver”. Rather, the
conversants adapt continuously to each other during the conversation: what a
participant says, and how and when she says it, depends on her perception of
the others’ behaviour, their (perceived and inferred) mental and communicational
capabilities and preferences, attention, understanding, emotional state, etc.
Conversation is thus a two-way street of multiple message types, no matter who
has the turn. From a technical point of view, face-to-face conversation can be
described as layered feedback loops, each at various time-scales. As a result,
the roles of “speaker” and “listener” are much more hard to distinguish than
may seem at first: While speaking, the one who has the turn is also a
“receiver”, paying close attention to the listener, who continuously produces
paraverbals such as “aha”, “hmhm”, non-verbal behaviors such as gaze, facial
expressions, signals about willingness to take the turn, interrupt, etc.,
and other actions relevant to the progression of the dialogue, all of which is
synchronized to the actions of the other participant to the decisecond.
Perception,
in addition to motor skill, is thus critical in organizing movement and
communication. The topic of the workshop is interaction between humans and
Embodied Communicative Agents (ECAs) where production of output is interwoven
with perception. Creating a real-time communication loop implies consideration
of information provided to one or more generation modules by one or more
perception modules. A well-tuned multi-layered communication loop allows an ECA
to perceive the user’s state, action and environment, and use these factors to
decide what, how, and when to present communicative content and behavior. In
the workshop we do not wish to address (the techniques of) perception per se,
but rather how perceptual data should be used to enhance the interaction, and
how it should be used to feed into different levels of the ECA’s
behaviour, like dialogue management, language usage, emotional reaction,
manual, facial and body gestures, and so on. Specific robust vision, speech and
language techniques, especially suited and/or used for ECAs are of course of
interest.
Perception
of the user’s characteristics is viewed in the broadest sense, including
perception of presence, both static information (age, gender, culture,
personality) and dynamic characteristics such as emotional and dialogue state
(misunderstanding, repetition, etc.). Perception of the environment and of
non-conversational parties may also be relevant, as well as the monitoring of
the agent’s own gesture and facial expression, when produced consciously in
order to achieve a special effect. Besides the
traditional perception-action loop, mixed and virtual reality scenarios are of
interest too, and can both complicate and simplify the set-up.
For the
workshop we wish to bring together researchers and developers of embodied
conversational characters with different background and expertise, to exchange
ideas and experiences on the various aspects involved in the creation of ECAs
in the loop:
-
linguistic
-
speech
(voice, intonation)
-
cognitive,
personality and emotion models
-
nonverbal
communication
-
animation
-
graphics
-
vision
-
dialogue
capabilities and social interaction with other agents
Contributions
from related fields like cognitive science and psychology (e.g. on guidelines
for models of adaptivity) are welcome, as well as presentation and evaluation
studies of ECAs which operate with complex perception-action loops.
Issues
to be addressed:
-
Perception
and adaptation in human-human communication
-
Integration
and interwoven usage of multiple input and output modalities
-
Perception
techniques used in, or specially suited for ECA applications (being robust,
fast, cheap as of hw required)
-
Models
integrating perception of the user: physical presence, reaction, behaviour,
inferred communicative intent, as well as cognitive and emotional states
-
Adaptation
to the user (age, gender, language, culture, personality, …)
-
Adaptation
to the operational environment (noise, public place)
-
Evaluation
studies of/for perceptive and adaptive ECAs
The
full-day workshop will give the opportunity to present papers, show demos, and
discuss issues in scheduled panel sessions.
Since we
aim at a highly focused event on balanced perception and action in ECAs, we
kindly ask authors to prepare their submissions according to the following
structure:
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. Submissions should be emailed to Catherine
Pelachaud (c.pelachaud@iut.univ-paris8.fr) in PS or PDF format by April 17th,
2004. If email is not possible, please sent two copies of your paper to
(though, email is much preferred):
Catherine Pelachaud
IUT of
140 rue de
93100 Montreuil
April
17 Deadline for submissions of
contributions
May 10
Authors notification
May 30
Submission of camera ready contribution for the workshop notes
July 20
Workshop
Primary Contact: Catherine Pelachaud (LINC, IUT de
Montreuil - University of Paris 8, 140 rue de
c.pelachaud@iut.univ-paris8.fr
Zsofia Ruttkay (Center for Mathematics and
Computer Science, INS2.2,
Kris
Thórisson,
Elisabeth Andre (DE)
Norman Badler (USA)
Antonio Camurri (I)
Doug De Carlo (USA)
Sylvie Gibet (F)
Bjorn Granstrom (SW)
Katherine Isbister (USA)
Stacy Marsella (USA)
Jean-Claude Martin (F)
Catherine Pelachaud (F)
Isabella Poggi (I)
Helmut Prendinger (J)
Thomas Rist (DE)
Zsofia Ruttkay (NL)
Candy Sidner (
Mark Steedman (UK)
Matthew Stone (
Kris Thórisson (Iceland)