Behavior Planning for Life-Like Characters and Avatars
In Conjunction with the i3 Spring Days '99
March 9th -10th 1999
Sitges, Spain

Workshop Information

What the Workshop is About

During the last decade, a growing number of research projects both in academia and industry embarked on the development of life-like agents as a new metaphor for highly personalized human-machine communication. 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. The visual appearance of an life-like interface agent is, however, only one side of the coin. To be useful, however, agents have to behave in a reasonable and natural manner. The workshop aims to bring together researchers and developers who share a common interest in all aspects of behavior planning for life-like agents. Topics of interest include, but are by no means restricted to the following:

Submission Details

We solicit the submission of abstracts (1-2 pages), demo proposals (1 page) and/or video-tapes (under 5 minutes) by January 16th 1999 (extended deadline). If at all possible, submit your abstract in electronic form (ASCII text) rather than printed copy: email to andre@dfki.de. Your abstract should include:

Workshop Participation

Workshop attendance will be limited to maximally 40 people. We will give preference to those people who have submitted an abstract and are willing to present their work. If a selection of contributions has to be made, this will be done by the members of the organisation committee on the basis of the information provided in the abstracts. Invited participants will be given an opportunity to present their work and are encouraged to bring demonstration prototypes or videos with them. To a certain extent, participation without giving a presentation is possible.

The workshop is sponsored by i3, and probably there will be no or a very low workshop fee. However, you should indicate your interest in participating ASAP, to assure your place at the workshop.

Publication

All authors are invited to submit an extended version of their abstract (5 - 20 pages) for publication in a workshop proceedings by July 31st 1999. The best papers will be selected for a Special Issue on Behavior Planning for Lifelike Characters and Avatars of Artificial Intelligence Communications. You are encouraged to use LaTeX for the preparation of your camera-ready manuscript together with the corresponding AICom style file aicom.sty which you can reach following this link or by sending an e-mail message to aicom . A demo file is also available. For authors not using LaTex Instructions to Authors are available. #All accepted abstracts will be printed in an informal workshop proceedings. #Depending on the quality of the contributions that we will receive, we #will seek for further publication opportunities.

Registration

All attendees of the i3 Spring Days must register for the events (ese-conference on Monday 8, workshops on Sunday 7, Tuesday 9 and Wednesday 10) in which they wish to participate.
With regard to the overall structure of the Spring Days a per-day registration is possible. That is, people can register for all four days, for three days, two days, or for a single day only.
The conference site offers two Registration Packages:
Besides your registration at Melia Gran Sitges, you are kindly asked to notify andre@dfki.de.

Preliminary Schedule

Full talks (F) will be 40 minutes (25 minutes talk + 15 minutes discussion), short talks (S) will be 20 minutes (15 minutes talk + 5 minutes discussion).

Last revised February 4th, 1999
Time schedule subject to change.

Tuesday, March 9th 1999

Welcome by the Organizers
9:00 - 9:10

SESSION I
9:10 - 10:30

Isabella Poggi, Catherine Pelachaud and Fiorella De Rosis Eye Communication in a Conversational 3D Synthetic Agent (F)
Paola Rizzo, Maria Miceli, and Amedeo Cesta Goal-based personalities in lifelike agents and hybrid planning techniques (F)

COFFEE
10:30 - 11:00

SESSION II
11:00 - 13:00

Fiorella de Rosis How to Consider Personality Factors in Simulating a 'Reasonable' and 'Natural' Behavior of Agents? (S)
Phoebe Sengers Planning for Human Interpretation (S)
Stan Franklin Action Selection and Language Generation in "Conscious" Software Agents (S) (S)
Wolfgang Broll, Thomas Schardt Symbolic Avatar Acting in Shared Virtual Environments (F)
Claus B. Madsen, Paolo Pirjanian and Erik Granum Can Finite State Automata, Numeric Mood Parameters and Reactive Behaviours Come Alive? (S)

LUNCH
13:00 - 14:00

COMMON ACTIVITIES
14:00 - 16:30

POSTERS
16:30 - 17:30

Jacob Buck Interactive Communicative Humanoid Agent for Movie Selection
Jakob Tholander and Fredrik Rutz Nagging the Student into Knowledge: a Pedagogical Assistant for Reflective Learning
Steve Allen Control States and Motivated Agency
Jarmo Laaksolahti and Annika Waern Talking to the Swedish Chef: Social Interactions in Recommender Systems

COFFEE
17:30 - 18:00

SESSION III
18:00 - 20:00

Elisabeth Andre, Jochen Mueller, Susanne van Mulken and Thomas Rist WebPersona: A Life-Like Presentation Agent for the World-Wide Web (F)
Per Person AGNETA & FRIDA: Browsing, Narrative and Emotion (F)
Kristina Höök, Marie Sjölinder, Anna-Lena Ereback, Per Persson Dealing with the Lurking Lutheran view on Interfaces: Evaluation of the Agneta and Frida system (F)

Wednesday, March 10th 1999

SESSION IV
9:00 - 10:40

Aaron Sloman Architectural Requirements for Human-like Agents Both Natural and Artificial. (What sorts of machines can love?) (F)
Christopher Kline and Bruce Blumberg Building Believable Synthetic Characters (F)
Yasmine Arafa, Patrick Charlton and Abe Mamdani Behind the Scenes of Life-like Personal Service Assistants: A Structured Approach to Integrating Personality Plans in Agent Behaviours (S)

LUNCH
10:40 - 11:10

SESSION V
11:10 - 13:00

Riccardo Antonini and Amy Brown Behavior Planning by Means of Genetic Evolution in Avatars and Non-Participating Characters (F)
Ricardo Imbert, Maria-Isabel Sanchez-Segura, Angelica de Antonio, Javier Segovia Usability vs. Control in Semi-Autonomous Avatars' Behaviour (S)
Alex Whittaker and Tiziano Riolfo An Object Model for a Behavioural Planning in a Dynamic Multi-Agent System (S)
Ruth Aylett Exploring behaviourally-driven agents with Virtual Teletubbies (S)

Wrap-Up
12:50 - 13:00

Important Dates

Organizing Committee

Elisabeth André, Project i3-ese Puppet
DFKI GmbH, Saarbrücken, Germany
Email: andre@dfki.de

Angelica de Antonio Jiménez, Project i3 Amusement
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain
Email: angelica@fi.upm.es

Kristina Höök, Project i3 Persona
SICS, Sweden
Email: kia@sics.se

Address for Further Information and Submissions:

Elisabeth André;
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence
Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3
66123 Saarbrücken
Phone: +49-861/302-5266
Fax: +49-861/302-5341
Email: andre@dfki.de