In conjunction with AmI’15, European Conference on Ambient Intelligence,
11-13 November 2015 - Athens, Greece

Avatars, also known as Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs), have been successfully employed in several domains, including gaming, education, health, training etc. Recently, the domain of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) has also been active in incorporating avatars as a front-end interface for elderly oriented solutions and services. Avatars provide an intuitive and natural way for elderly users to interact with intelligent systems that offer services or help them with their daily activities.

Since emotions play a fundamental role in human communication, within the scope of AAL, the affective capabilities an agent employs have strong impact on the perception of its intelligence, quality of interaction, and more importantly, on user engagement. Affective interaction involves several aspects like the recognition of the user’s affective state, based for example on speech and video processing, the computational modelling of the agent’s affective state and behaviour, expression of affect via animated facial and/or bodily expressions, dialogue management which gracefully handles errors and interruptions, etc.

Successfully addressing open challenges in these domains can increase the frequency and quality of interaction, leading to a better acceptance of the agents and, in general, of AAL solutions. Principles of affective interaction may be similarly applied to robot-based systems to gain similar benefits in the domain on Ambient Intelligence.

This workshop aims at discussing different aspects for the affective interaction with avatars (and robots). Topics include (but are not limited to) the following:

Affect recognition using different modalities, e.g. physiological signals, voice, facial expressions, and gestures
Affect fusion from different modalities under different time constraints
Advanced dialogue management for affective avatar interaction
Computational models of moods, emotions, personalities and memory
Affective and empathic behaviour in expressive avatars
Evaluation studies and case studies from a point of view of practical applications