WORKSHOP CALL FOR PAPERS

ICMI-2012 Workshop on Speech and Gesture Production in
Virtually and Physically Embodied Conversational Agents

URL: http://robotics.usc.edu/~icmi

CONFERENCE: 
14th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI-2012)
LOCATION: Santa Monica, California, USA

IMPORTANT DATES:
  * Submission deadline: Monday, June 4, 2012
  * Notification: Monday, July 30, 2012
  * Camera-ready deadline: Monday, September 10, 2012
  * Workshop: Friday, October 26, 2012

DESCRIPTION:
This full day workshop aims to bring together researchers from the
embodied conversational agent (ECA) and sociable robotics communities
to spark discussion and collaboration between the related fields. The
focus of the workshop will be on co-verbal behavior production —
specifically, synchronized speech and gesture — for both virtually
and physically embodied platforms. It will elucidate the subject in
consideration of aspects regarding planning and realization of
multimodal behavior production. Topics discussed will highlight common
and distinguishing factors of their implementations within each
respective field. The workshop will feature a panel discussion with
experts from the relevant communities, and a breakout session
encouraging participants to identify design and implementation
principles common to both virtually and physically embodied sociable
agents.

TOPICS:
Under the focus of speech-gesture-based multimodal human-agent
interaction, the workshop invites submissions describing original
work, either completed or still in progress, related to one or more of
the following topics:
  * Computational approaches to:
    - Content and behavior planning, e.g., rule-based or probabilistic models
    - Behavior realization for virtual agents or sociable robots
  * From ECAs to physical robots: potential and challenges of
  cross-platform approaches
  * Behavior specification languages and standards, e.g., FML, BML, MURML
  * Speech-gesture synchronization, e.g., open-loop vs. closed-loop approaches
  * Situatedness within social/environmental contexts
  * Feedback-based user adaptation
  * Cognitive modeling of gesture and speech

SUBMISSIONS:
Workshop contributions should be submitted via e-mail in the ACM
publication style to icmi2012ws.speech.gesture@gmail.com in one of the
following formats:
  * Full paper (5-6 pages, PDF file)
  * Short position paper (2-4 pages, PDF file)
  * Demo video (1-3 minutes, common file formats, e.g., AVI or MP4)
  including an extended abstract (1-2 pages, PDF file)

If a submission exceeds 10MB, it should be made available online and a
URL should be provided instead.

Submitted papers and abstracts should conform to the ACM publication
style; for templates and examples, follow the link: http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html.

Accepted papers will be included in the workshop proceedings in ACM
Digital Library; video submissions and accompanying abstracts will be
published on the workshop website. Contributors will be invited to
give either an oral or a video presentation at the workshop.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE:
  * Dan Bohus (Microsoft Research)
  * Kerstin Dautenhahn (University of Hertfordshire)
  * Jonathan Gratch (USC Institute for Creative Technologies)
  * Alexis Heloir (German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence)
  * Takayuki Kanda (ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories)
  * Jina Lee (Sandia National Laboratories)
  * Stacy Marsella (USC Institute for Creative Technologies)
  * Maja Mataric' (University of Southern California)
  * Louis-Philippe Morency (USC Institute for Creative Technologies)
  * Bilge Mutlu (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
  * Victor Ng-Thow-Hing (Honda Research Institute USA)
  * Catherine Pelachaud (TELECOM ParisTech)

WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS:
  * Ross Mead (University of Southern California)
  * Maha Salem (Bielefeld University)

CONTACT:
  * Workshop Questions and Submissions (icmi2012ws.speech.gesture@gmail.com)
  * Ross Mead (rossmead@usc.edu)
  * Maha Salem (msalem@cor-lab.uni-bielefeld.de)