In conjunction with AmI’18, European Conference on Ambient Intelligence,12-14 November 2018 – Larnaca, Cyprus

Avatars, also known as Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs), have been successfully employed in several domains, including gaming, education, health, training, Active and Assisted Living (AAL) etc. ECAs provide an intuitive and natural way for users to interact with intelligent systems that offer services of different kinds.

Since emotions play a fundamental role in human communication, the affective capabilities an agent employs have a 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, selection of appropriate responses that are designed to influence the user affective, synthesis and 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, the provided 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 is designed to bring researchers in the field together to continue the discussion started during the previous edition which was held at AmI 2017.

Topics of interest

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

1. Affect recognition using different modalities, e.g. physiological signals, voice, facial expressions, and gestures

2. Affect fusion from different modalities under different time constraints

3. Advanced dialogue management for affective human-agent interaction

4. Computational models of moods, emotions, personalities and memory

5. Expression of affective and empathic behaviour in expressive avatars and robots (e.g. what types of affective elements should be expressed and which modalities are appropriate?)

6. Evaluation studies and case studies from a point of view of practical applications (e.g. what are the best means of evaluating affective interactions?)

7. Perception of avatars in Virtual and Augmented Reality

Submission guidelines

We invite full-papers, work-in progress and position papers that address one or more of the topics of interest.

All submitted papers will be peer-reviewed.

Accepted and revised papers will be invited for publication in an ENTCS Journal. Papers must be prepared in ELSEVIER Journal format and should follow the publication policies of ENTCS. All papers must be prepared using LaTeX macros provided by Elsevier.

The macros can be obtained on the ENTCS Macro Web Site http://www.entcs.org along with detailed instructions about preparing the papers for the series.

Papers need to be submitted to Easychair.