Workshop
Objectives

Invited
Speakers

Important
Dates

Submission
Details and
Contact

Online Proceedings

Organizing and
Program
Committee

Registration

Sponsorship

Workshop Objectives

Lifelike animated agents are one of the most exciting technologies for human-computer interface applications. They convincingly take the roles of virtual presenters, synthetic actors and sales personas, teammates and tutors. A common characteristic underlying their believability as conversational characters are computational models that provide them with affective functions such as synthetic emotions and personalities, and implement human interactive behavior or presentation skills.

The workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners of lifelike animated agents to discuss applications of synthetic characters, ranging from product presentation and tutoring to interactive gaming. The success of most animated agent systems today heavily relies on the careful crafting of their designers. The wide dissemination of animated agents in interactive systems, however, will greatly depend on the availability of tools that facilitate scripting of intelligent lifelike behavior. The affordances for putting animated agents to work are manifold, including the control of one or multiple agents and the implementation of agents' affective behavior and competence. To this end, the workshop - besides assessing the state of the art - strives to identify key problems and solutions in authoring animated agents with believable behavior.

The workshop will be organized to discuss the following issues:

• Assessment of the state of the art of frameworks for lifelike animated agents and interactive agent behavior, models for affective behavior;

• Scripting tools for controling interactive agents, tools to facilitate knowledge engineering of agents' affective and competence models;

• Evaluation of systems, usability of systems and tools.

The topic of the workshop includes (but is by no way limited to) the following:

Relevant Subject Areas

• Applications of lifelike animated agents
• Implementations of lifelike agents, such as presenter and sales agents, pedagogical agents, teammate agents, non-player game agents, pet characters, etc.
• Tools for scripting behavior and competence of believable animated agents
• Authoring animation of agents
• Scripting affective functions in animated agents
• Emotion-based agent architectures
• Verbal and non-verbal behavior in animated agents
• Reasoning about emotion, personality, social setting
• Emotion expression in animated agents
• Emotions and personality in human-computer interaction
• Theories and models of emotion and personality
• Affective user modelling
• Learning and adaptive agents
• Influence of the cultural context on agent behavior
• Empirical evaluations of animated agent systems
• Usability studies of tools for authoring animated agents

Invited Speakers

Thomas Rist
« An Evolutionary Perspective on Animated Presentation Agents and their Application Fields»
[biographical information]

Jonathan Gratch
« So you want your agent to feel...: Issues in the modeling and expression of emotion for interactive virtual humans»
[biographical information]

Submission Details and Contact

The workshop organizers welcome submissions of high-quality papers that describe completed or on-going work relevant to Lifelike Animated Agents. The papers must be written in English.

Authors should indicate their interest to submit a paper by sending an e-mail to the workshop organizer, containing the (tentative) title and the name(s) and contact address(es) of the authors. Indications of interest should reach the workshop organizer no later than April 15, 2002.

Papers are due on April 30, 2002 and should not exceed six (6) pages including figures, tables, and references. Although no particular style is required, authors are strongly encouraged to use LaTeX or Word (10-11 point font, 2 columns with reasonable margins).

Besides title and author name(s), all submissions should contain full contact information and e-mail, as well as abstract, and a list of keywords (preferably from the list above).

Submission Procedure

Indications of interest should be sent via e-mail to the workshop organizer by April 15, 2002.

Paper submissions should be sent electronically as postscript or preferably PDF e-mail attachments. If this is not possible, hard copy submissions can be sent to the address below. All submissions must reach the workshop organizer by April 30, 2002.

Submission Address and Contact Information

E-mail: helmut@miv.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp

Helmut Prendinger
Dept. of Information and Communication Engineering
Graduate School of Information Science and Technology
University of Tokyo
7-3-1, Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan

Phone: +81-3-5841-6755
Fax: +81-3-5841-8570

Online Proceedings

The workshop notes are now available online.

Workshop Organizer

Helmut Prendinger, University of Tokyo, Japan

Program Committee

Elisabeth André, University of Augsburg, Germany
Timothy Bickmore, MIT Media Laboratory, USA
Fiorella De Rosis, University of Bari, Italy
Shuji Hashimoto, Waseda University, Japan
Mitsuru Ishizuka, University of Tokyo, Japan
Masahide Kaneko, University of Electro-Communications, Japan
Tetsunori Kobayashi, Waseda University, Japan
Shigeo Morishima, Seikei University, Japan
Paolo Petta, Austrian Research Institute for AI, Austria
Jeff Rickel, USC Information Sciences Institute, USA
Thomas Rist, DFKI GmbH, Germany
Yasuyuki Sumi, ATR, Japan
Nigel Ward, University of Tokyo, Japan

Registration

For details about registration and accomodation, consult the conference web site at (http://pricai-02.nii.ac.jp).

Sponsorship

This workshop is sponsored by the Research Grant (1999-2003) for the Future Program («Mirai Kaitaku») from the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS).