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.

*** IVA 2020 will be the 20th Annual Conference. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it will be held as a series of moderated online panel sessions with selected authors. All accepted Full Papers and Extended Abstracts will be published in ACM proceedings ***

IVAs are interactive characters that exhibit human-like qualities including communicating using natural human modalities such as facial expressions, speech and gesture. IVAs are also capable of real-time perception, cognition, emotion and action that allows them to participate in dynamic social situations.

IVA 2020 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. We also welcome submissions on central theoretical issues, uses of virtual agents in psychological research and showcases of working applications.

IVA 2020 offers two submission tracks: Papers (8 pages, including references) and Extended Abstracts (3 pages, including references). We welcome and encourage the submission of early results and work in progress as Extended Abstracts.

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 select Extended Abstracts, will be included in moderated online panel sessions, spread out across the conference week. Papers rejected at the first submission round (deadline 15th of June) may be invited to submit a revision by the second submission round (deadline 3rd of August). The second submission is also open for new submissions.

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 tool chains
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 2020 TOPIC
Exploring Connections between Computer Science, Robotics and Psychology.

Across computer science, robotics, psychology and the commercial world, there has been a rapid growth in the research, development and application of artificial social agents. Computer scientists and roboticists are researching graphics-based and physical social agents. Psychologists and neuroscientists are using these artifacts in laboratory experiments in order to study our interaction with them as well as to use them as confederates in the study of human behavior. Companies are actively developing similar technologies. However, these communities too rarely interact even though there are close synergies between psychology, the study of human behavior, and artificial social agents, the engineering of human behavior. The design of an artificial social agent involves the formalization of theories and data about human behavior, integration of resulting models into an agent and evaluation of its behavior, leveraging techniques derived from psychology. Each of these steps can in return be of fundamental value to psychological research. For example, formalization and integration forces one to concretely specify theoretical constructs and thereby expose hidden assumptions and gaps in theories. IVA 2020’s Special Topic provides an invitation to researchers and developers across disciplines to share their work on the challenges and uses of social agent research, in the hope to further trans-disciplinary collaboration.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS
Paper submissions should be anonymous and prepared in the “ACM Standard” format, more specifically the “SigConf” format.
● The LaTeX template for the “ACM Standard”/”SigConf” format can be found inside the official 2017 ACM Master article template package. Please use the most recent version available at: https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template#h-latex-authors
● The “ACM Standard” Microsoft Word template is currently not part of the downloadable package as the ACM is currently revising it to improve accessibility of resulting PDF-documents. Please use the “Interim Word Template” instead as per the instructions in: https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template#h-word-authors

IVA 2020 accepts two types of submissions:
● Full papers: 8 pages (including references)
● Extended abstracts: 3 pages (including references)
All papers must be submitted in PDF-format. We welcome and encourage the submission of early results and work in progress as Extended Abstracts.

Supplementary material: IVA 2020 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.

Important Dates
First Submission Deadline: Monday, June 15, 2020 (23:59 UTC-12)
First Notification of acceptance: Wednesday, July 15, 2020
Second Submission Deadline: Monday, August 3rd, 2020 (23:59 UTC-12)
Second Notification of acceptance: Wednesday, September 2nd, 2020
Camera-Ready Submission: Wednesday, September 16, 2020 (23:59 UTC-12)
Online Conference Dates: October 19th-23rd 2020

Submission page: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=iva20