Call for Workshop Submissions/Participation

ANIMATED INTERFACE AGENTS:
MAKING THEM INTELLIGENT

Nagoya, Japan, August 25, 1997

(in conjunction with IJCAI-97)

Workshop Information

What the Workshop is About

Through the last decade, the design of user interfaces has undergone dramatic changes. The introduction of multi-windowing and the exploitation of multimedia technology that allows for presentations which incorporate written and spoken text, sound, graphics, animation, and even virtual 3D reality has opened up completely new possibilities. The next major step in the evolution of interfaces is very likely to be a shift towards highly personalized interfaces in which communication between user and computer will be mediated by life-like agents. Due to advances in computer graphics, the realization of visually appealing agents, either based on real video, cartoon-style drawings or even model-based 3D graphics, has become manageable. To be useful, however, agents have to behave in a reasonable and natural manner. The purpose of this workshop is to discuss behavioral aspects from an AI perspective. Topics of interest include, but are by no means restricted to the following:

Organizing Committee:

Elisabeth André, DFKI, Germany (Email: andre@dfki.uni-sb.de)
James Lester, North Carolina State University, USA (Email: lester@eos.ncsu.edu)
Thomas Rist, DFKI, Germany (Email: rist@dfki.uni-sb.de)
Aki Takeuchi, Sony, Japan (Email: takeuchi@arch.sony.co.jp)

Programme Committee:

Elisabeth André, DFKI, Germany
Gene Ball, Microsoft, USA
Justine Cassell, MIT Media Lab, USA
Osamu Hasegawa, ETL, Japan
James Lester, North Carolina State University, USA
Susann Luperfoy, MITRE, USA
Kenji Mase, ATR International, Japan
Shigeo Morishima, Seikei University, Japan
Clifford Nass, Stanford University, USA
Jeff Rickel, ISI, USA
Thomas Rist, DFKI, Germany
Aki Takeuchi, Sony, Japan
Marilyn Walker, AT&T Research Laboratories, USA

Publication:

IJCAI will produce workshop proceedings. Furthermore, extended versions of selected workshop papers will be published in a special issue of the Applied Artificial Intelligence Journal. For more details click here.

Workshop Participation:

Workshop attendance will be limited to maximally 40 people, persons without a submission should contact the organizers as soon as possible. According to the IJCAI workshop guidelines, all workshop participants must register for the IJCAI main conference.

Program at a Glance:

8:30-8:45

Welcome by the Organizers

8:45-10:05

Guidelines and Design Principles

10:05-11:00

Frameworks and Design Tools

11:00-11:30

Coffee

11:30-13:00

Conversational and Pedagogical Agents I

13:00-14:00

Lunch

14:00-15:30

Conversational and Pedagogical Agents II

15:30-16:00

 Coffee

16:00-16:55

Facial Displays

16:55-18:15

Characters and Emotions

Exact Time Schedule:

Last revised April 22th, 1997
Time schedule subject to change.

8:30

WELCOME BY THE ORGANIZERS

DESIGN GUIDELINES AND PRINCIPLES

8:45 Bringing an Agent to Life Maz Kessler and Robby Kilgore
9:10 Metaphor to Personality: The Role of Animation in Intelligent Interface Agents Michael Wilson
9:35 Social Implications of Using Synthetic Characters Katherine Isbister and Barbara Hayes-Roth
9:45

Summary and Discussion
Rapporteur: Thomas Rist

FRAMEWORKS AND DESIGN TOOLS

10:05 Hierarchical Agent Interface for Animation Armin Bruderlin, Sidney Fels, Silvio Esser and Kenji Mase
Aspects of Interface Agents: Avatar, Assistant and Actor Kenji Mase
10:30

Coffee

FRAMEWORKS AND DESIGN TOOLS

11:00 A CG Tool for Constructing Anthropomorphic Interface Agents Osamu Hasegawa and Katsuhiko Sakaue
11:10

Summary and Discussion
Rapporteur: James Lester

CONVERSATIONAL AND PEDAGOGICAL AGENTS I

11:30 Olga - A Conversational Agent with Gestures Jonas Beskow and Scott McGlashan
11:40 A Virtual Human Presenter Tsukasa Noma and Norman I. Badler
11:50 WebPersona: A Life-Like Presentation Agent for the World-Wide Web Elisabeth André, Thomas Rist and Jochen Müller
12:15 Cosmo: A Life-Like Animated Pedagogical Agent with Deictic Believability James C. Lester, Jennifer L. Voerman, Stuart G. Towns and Charles B. Callaway
12:40

Summary and Discussion
Rapporteur: Barbara Hayes-Roth

13:00

CONVERSATIONAL AND PEDAGOGICAL AGENTS II

14:00 Steve: An Animated Pedagogical Agent for Procedural Training in Virtual Environments Jeff Rickel and W. Lewis Johnson
14:25 An Intelligent Guide for Virtual Environments Patrick Doyle and Barbara Hayes-Roth
14:35 Character Mastery with Improvisational Puppets Ruth D. Huard and Barbara Hayes-Roth
15:00

Summary and Discussion
Rapporteur: Jeff Rickel

15:30

Coffee

FACIAL DISPLAYS

16:00 A Physics-based Talking Head for Interface Agent Shigeo Morishima, Hajime Sera and Demetri Terzopoulos
16:25 Motion Patterns in Face Animation Hai Tao and Thomas S. Huang
16:35

Summary and Discussion
Rapporteur: Justine Cassell

CHARACTERS AND EMOTIONS

16:55 Communicative Feedback in Human-Humanoid Dialogue Kristinn R. Thorisson and Justine Cassell
17:20 Animist Interface: Mapping Character Animation to Computational State Richard Lachman
17:30 Integrating Affective Computing into Animated Tutoring Agents Clark Elliot, James Lester and Jeff Rickel
17:55

Summary and Discussion
Rapporteur: Elisabeth André

18:15

E n d

Financial Support for IJCAI-97 Participants:

Travel award programs are available for students and junior researchers through IJCAII and other national societies (Deadline for Applications: May 1, 1997).

Important Dates:

3rd March 1997: (Closed)
Deadline for receipt of extended abstracts, project/demo descriptions, videos etc.
1st April 1997: (Done)
Authors informed of acceptance/rejection
23rd April 1997: (Closed)
Final versions due for proceedings
20th June 1997:
IJCAI-97 Early Registration Deadline
25th August 1997:
1-Day Workshop
12th December 1997:
Deadline for Special Issue in the Applied Artificial Intelligence Journal

Workshop Participants:

Elisabeth André, DFKI, Germany
Jonas Beskow, Centre for Speech Technology KITH, Sweden
Justine Cassell, MIT Media Lab, USA
Yoonsuck Choe, University of Texas at Austin, USA
Hiroshi Dohi, University of Tokyo, Japan
Patrick Doyle, Stanford University, USA
Clark Elliot, DePaul University, USA
Tameyuki Etani, ATR International, Japan
Tom Fenton-Kerr, University of Sydney, Australia
Osamu Hasegawa, ETL, Japan
Barbara Hayes-Roth, Stanford University, USA
Thomas S. Huang, The Beckman Institute, USA
Katherine Isbister, Stanford University, USA
Mitsuru Ishizuka, University of Tokyo, Japan
Tsuneaki Kato, NTT Information and Communication Systems Laboratories, Japan
Carl Gustaf Jansson, Stockholm University, DSV, Sweden
Maz Kessler, FunArts, USA
Robby Kilgore, FunArts, USA
Seiji Koide, IHI Co., Ltd., Japan
Richard Lachman, MIT Media Lab, USA
James Lester, North Carolina State University, USA
Kenji Mase, ATR International, Japan
Shigeo Morishima, Seikei University, Japan
John Myers, Dragonlord EnterPrises, USA
Hiroshi Nakajima, OMRON Corp., Japan
Tsukasa Noma, Kyushu Institute of Technology, Japan
Jeff Rickel, ISI, USA
Thomas Rist, DFKI, Germany
Kunikazu Suzuki, Oki Electric Industry Co., Ltd., Japan
Taizan Suzuki, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan
Hideyuki Tamura, Mixed Reality Systems Lab, Inc., Japan
Hirohide Ushida, OMRON Corp., Japan
Ljubo Vlacic, Griffith University, Australia
Yuko Wakatsuki, Mixed Reality Systems Lab, Inc., Japan
Michael Wilson, RAL, UK

Address for Further Information:

Elisabeth André
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence
Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3
66123 Saarbrücken
Phone: +49-861/302-5267
Fax: +49-861/302-5341
Email: andre@dfki.uni-sb.de