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Workshop on Persuasive Embodied Agents for Behavior Change
Intelligent Virtual Agents conference 2017 (IVA2017)
27 August
Stockholm, Sweden

http://ii.tudelft.nl/peach2017
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This workshop is a part of the International Conference on Intelligent Virtual agents (http://iva2017.org/). The workshop will take place on the day before the main conference (27th of August 2017).


WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION

Persuasive embodied agents can play an active role in supporting people in changing their behavior, emotion, or attitude. These agents can be part of training systems, ehealth systems, or decision systems. They help people in establishing, reinforcing, or altering behaviors. Embodiment, such as in physical robots or graphical characters, can help to elicit social responses and make these systems more persuasive and accessible. Key in their interaction with individuals are therefore agents' postures, gestures, and emotions, but also their conversational dialogue styles. Adaptiveness to users and situations is also pursued to strengthen their effectiveness in teaching individuals new skills or modifying their lifestyle.

This full day workshop focuses on embodied agents that are used for assessment, coaching, training, rehabilitation, or treatment of individuals, both professionals (e.g. doctors, soldiers, teachers, or managers), or non-professionals (e.g. patients, children, or elderly).

We intend to structure the workshop in such a way that participants with accepted contributions first present their research. We then split the audience into smaller groups to brainstorm on a question/matter of concern to the presenter. You can thus see this as a chance to get valuable input, but also, for example, to have participants examine your questionnaire, review your system, or reflect on your research vision. Note that it is for this reason that we also welcome research at early stages.


PARTICIPATION

This is a full-day workshop. Researchers that are interested in attending the workshop are asked to submit a (position) paper of their work. Workshop members are invited to present their research and strongly encouraged to demonstrate their agents. Submissions can be submitted at the EasyChair website for the conference (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=peach2017). See the workshop website (http://ii.tudelft.nl/peach2017) for further submission details. There will be no workshop proceedings, but we will make accepted submissions available on the workshop website upon request of the authors.


TOPICS

This workshop invites researchers, designers, and developers that are interested in questions such as:
- What are effective and acceptable strategies for these agents?
- How can agents enhance adherence?
- How to bootstrap agents’ adaptiveness when this is data driven?
- What are effective strategies to establish a long-term relationship between the agent and individual?
- Ethics and persuasion: how to balance them?
- Do explainable agents contribute to persuasiveness?
- What are easy and effective frameworks for establishing embodied agents?
- How can professionals and agents work together in supporting users?
- How do you create a natural interaction with an embodied agent?
- When and how can agents use an enforcing and balancing feedback loop to regulate someone’s behavior?
- How to establish alliance between agent and the user?
- What kind of emotion models are helpful in human-agent interactions?

These agents can be part of systems, such as:
- Simulated patient training systems
- Care robots
- Negotiation training systems
- eLearning systems
- Self-management health support systems
- Financial coaching system
- Virtual health agents
- Therapeutic systems
- Health apps
- Social robots

IMPORANT DATES

Paper submission: July 19, 2017
Acceptance notification: July 26, 2017
Workshop: August 27, 2017


ORGANIZATION AND PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Femke Beute - Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
Robbert Jan Beun - Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Timothy Bickmore - Northeastern University, USA
Tibor Bosse - Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Joost Broekens - Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Willem-Paul Brinkman - Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Franziska Burger - Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
John-Jules Ch. Meyer - Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Mark A. Neerincx - Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Rifca Peters - Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Albert 'Skip' Rizzo - University of Southern California, USA
Khiet Truong - University of Twente, The Netherlands
Roelof de Vries - University of Twente, The Netherlands