Call for Papers

The Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA) Annual Conference is the premier international event for interdisciplinary research on the design, application, and evaluation of Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) with a specific focus on the ability to socially interact. IVAs are interactive characters that exhibit human-like qualities including communicating using natural human modalities such as facial expressions, speech, and gesture.

IVA 2022 aims to showcase cutting-edge research on the design, application, and evaluation of IVAs, as well as the basic research underlying the technology that supports human-agent interaction such as social perception, dialog modeling, and social behavior planning. This year, we particularly encourage submissions exploring the challenges of developing, authoring, and deploying multi-IVA reusable environments targeted both at expert and non-expert users.

IIVA 2022 offers three submission tracks: Full Papers (7 pages + 1 additional page for references), Extended Abstracts (2 pages + 1 additional page for references), and Demos (2 pages + 1 additional page for references). While full papers should present well-supported significant and novel work, we welcome and encourage the submission of early results and work in progress as Extended Abstracts, and offer the Demo track as an opportunity for participants to present their latest IVA developments, interactive systems, and novel applications being particularly welcome.

All submissions will be double-blind peer-reviewed by a group of external expert reviewers. All accepted submissions will be published in the ACM proceedings. Accepted Full Papers and selected Extended Abstracts will be included in moderated panel sessions, spread out across the conference week. For each accepted contribution, at least one of the authors must register for the conference.

During the IVA submission process for full papers, extended abstracts, and demos, the authors will be given the opportunity to comment on the initial reviews written on their submissions, during a rebuttal period. The main purpose of the rebuttal period is to help the program committee to improve the quality and accuracy of the reviewing and decision process, by having the author point out potential omissions and mistakes (both conceptual and technical) in the reviews.

IVA 2022 will also feature workshops, the GALA event, a Doctoral Consortium, and an Industry Track. Please visit the corresponding pages for more details on the contributions to these events.

Please visit the Important Dates page for the details on the deadlines.

Scope and List of Topics

IVA invites submissions on a broad range of topics, including but not limited to:

Agent Design and modeling of:

  • Cognition
  • Emotion (including personality and cultural differences)
  • Socially communicative behavior (e.g., of emotions, personality traits)
  • Conversational behavior
  • Social perception
  • Machine learning approaches to agent modeling
  • Approaches to realizing adaptive behavior
  • Models informed by theoretical and empirical research from psychology

Multimodal interaction:

  • Verbal and nonverbal behavior coordination
  • Face-to-face communication skills
  • Engagement
  • Managing co-presence and interpersonal relation
  • Multi-party interaction
  • Data-driven multimodal modeling

Social agent architectures:

  • Design criteria and design methodologies
  • Engineering of real-time human-agent interaction
  • Standards / measures to support interoperability
  • Portability and reuse
  • Specialized tools, toolkits, and toolchains

Evaluation methods and studies:

  • Evaluation methodologies and user studies
  • Ethical considerations and societal impact
  • Applicable lessons across fields (e.g. between robotics and virtual agents)
  • Social agents as a means to study and model human behavior

Applications:

  • Applications in education, skills training, health, counseling, games, art, etc.
  • Virtual agents in games and simulations
  • Social agents as tools in psychology
  • Migration between platforms

Special IVA 2022 Topic

Developing, Authoring, and Deploying Multi-IVA Environments

Intelligent Virtual Agents, whether virtually or physically embodied, is a technology that has an enormous potential in a myriad of applications including tutoring, entertainment, medicine, and educational games. Research advances in how they perceive the environment, reason, and decide how to interact with other agents and humans have powered the creation of IVAs that act in an autonomous and socially intelligent way. Challenges exist in creating technology that can be reused and easily deployed in the most diverse contexts and applications by expert and non-expert users, with minimal authoring effort, allowing the author to focus only on the purpose of the IVA. IVA 2022 welcomes researchers and developers across disciplines to share their work on the challenges of developing, authoring, and deploying Multi-IVA Environments.

Types of Submission

  • Full papers (7 pages + 1 additional page for references). Full papers should present significant, novel, and substantial work of high quality that needs proceedings space to explain and replicate the work.
  • Extended Abstracts (2 pages + 1 additional page for references): We welcome and encourage the submission of early results and work in progress as Extended Abstracts. Accepted extended abstracts will be presented at the conference during the poster session and included in the conference proceedings.
  • Demos (2 pages + 1 additional page for references): Demos focus on implemented systems, and are supplemented by Demo Abstracts, including a hyperlink to a video of the demo up to 5 minutes long. Demo submissions will be demonstrated during the demo session and Demo Abstracts included in the conference proceedings.

Supplementary material: IVA 2022 does not contemplate the upload of supplementary material. If necessary to direct readers to supplemental data, we encourage authors to host such material in a public repository and add a link to it in the paper.

Instructions for Authors

Paper submissions should be anonymous and prepared in the “ACM Standard” format, more specifically the “SigConf” format.

Submission Site

To submit your paper please visit the following website.

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=iva22