Attendance of the tutorials is included in the IVA registration for the Main Conference, but registration is mandatory. To register for the tutorials follow the link below:
https://forms.gle/FzW66cFuXPokTeyU7
The Tutorials will take place on 6th September, at Universidade do Algarve, Campus de Gambelas, Building 8, room 2.12 (1st floor).
9:00 – T1 – Open-Task Multimodal Conversational Assistants
By João Magalhães, Rafael Ferreira
(Half-day tutorial – Sep 6th, morning)
Recently, conversational systems have seen a significant rise in demand due to modern commercial applications such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Google Assistant. The research on multimodal chatbots is a widely underexplored area, where users and the conversational agent communicate by natural language and visual data.
Conversational agents are currently becoming a commodity as various companies push for this technology. The wide use of these conversational agents exposes the many challenges in achieving more natural, human-like, and engaging agents. The research community is actively addressing several of these challenges: How to engage in a conversation about multimodal content? How to interpret the user intent? And many others.
In this tutorial, we will introduce the concept of Conversational Task Assistants, agents that can help users complete real-world tasks. After the introduction, we will cover the state-of-the-art in areas that are critical to the creation of a successful conversational agent with multimodal capabilities. We will start by discussing the challenges of assistant embodiment and personality, and we will address the recent advances in supporting multimodal conversations, language understanding methods, and strategies to make conversations more natural and engaging.
In the final part of the tutorial, we will present live examples of the discussed topics with an agent for online shopping, and TWIZ, an Alexa’s TaskBot Challenge award-winning conversational assistant.
For more information visit https://sites.google.com/campus.fct.unl.pt/multimodal-conv-assistants-22/
14:00 – T2 – FAtiMA-Toolkit: An accessible tool for the development of socio-emotional agents
By Manuel Guimarães, Joao Dias, Pedro A. Santos and Joana Campos
(Half-day tutorial – Sep 6th, afternoon)
FAtiMA-Toolkit is an intelligent agent-modeling tool that is designed to facilitate the creation and use of cognitive agents with socio-emotional skills. It promotes the design of human-agent scenarios where authors have control of every aspect of the interaction.
One of the main goals of FAtiMA-Toolkit is to empower authors with 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.
FAtiMA is now more accessible, easier to incorporate into different projects and platforms such as Augmented and Virtual Reality, and more flexible in its capabilities for human-agent interaction. In addition to this, the toolkit’s most recent versions make use of data-driven models to provide authors with an improved authoring experience.
In this tutorial, we will go through all the essential steps to create an interactive human-agent experience using FAtiMA-Toolkit. We will start with a brief presentation on the field of intelligence agents. This introduction will serve as a bridge to start using the tool. Then we will go through the standard authoring steps when creating a human-agent interaction. In the second part of the tutorial, participants will be asked to create their own scenario and try to implement it using FAtiMA-Toolkit.
For more information visit https://fatima-toolkit.eu/
Schedule
| 8:30 | Registration |
| 9:00 | Tutorial (T1) – Open-Task Multimodal Conversational Assistants (PART I) João Magalhães and Rafael Ferreira |
| 10:30 | Coffee Break |
| 11:00 | Tutorial (T1) – Open-Task Multimodal Conversational Assistants (PART II) João Magalhães and Rafael Ferreira |
| 12:30 | Lunch Break |
| 14:00 | Tutorial (T2)- FAtiMA-Toolkit: An accessible tool for the development of socio-emotional agents (PART I) Manuel Guimarães, João Dias, Pedro A. Santos and Joana Campos |
| 15:30 | Coffee Break |
| 16:00 | Tutorial (T2)- FAtiMA-Toolkit: An accessible tool for the development of socio-emotional agents (PART II) Manuel Guimarães, João Dias, Pedro A. Santos and Joana Campos |
| 17:30 | End of Day |