IVA 2024: ACE: how Artificial Character Embodiment shapes user behaviour in multi-modal interactions

Web page: https://sites.google.com/view/ace2024workshop/home 

IMPORTANT DATES:

• Submission deadline: July 19, 2024 July 24, 2024
• Notification to authors: August 16, 2024
• Camera-ready: September 2, 2024

MOTIVATION:

The body shapes the mind: bodily representations structure the way humans perceive the world and the way they perceive other people. Cognitive sciences and social sciences altogether have stressed the importance of embodiment in social interaction, highlighting how interacting with others influences how we behave, perceive and think. As the sense of embodiment can be defined as the ensemble of sensations that arise in conjunction with being inside, having, and controlling a body, it definitely influences self-perceptions and actions regarding one's own avatar, but also our social behaviours with embodied intelligent agents such as virtual humans and robots.

The topic is multidisciplinary by nature: embodiment can affect both human-human and human-agent (either virtual or robotic) interactions and this influence can arise through different sensory modalities. For instance, in virtual environments, users may experience what is known as the Proteus effect, a well-known phenomenon where the appearance of users' avatars influences their behaviour, but whose underlying cognitive processes are still not clear. In human-robot and human-agent interactions, the level of anthropomorphism can impact human reactions and behaviours during the interaction (e.g., uncanny valley of visual appearance or motions that disturb responses and sense of presence in virtual reality). These phenomena are not only of interest for the design of artificial characters, either virtual or robotic, but could also help to shed light on social behaviour and cognition, providing new tools and experimental perspectives.

The ACE workshop aims to bring together researchers, practitioners and experts on the topic of embodiment,to analyse and foster discussion on its effects on user behaviour in multi-modal interaction contexts. Objectives are to stimulate multidisciplinary discussions on the topic, to share recent progress, and to provide participants with a forum to debate current and future challenges. Contributions from computational, neuroscientific and psychological perspectives, as well as technical applications, will be welcomed.

We welcome both technical and theoretical contributions around the role of embodiment on multi-modal interaction. Their focus can be either on the user embodying an avatar or on one or several embodied artificial agents interacting with the user. We encourage researchers from different domains such as Computer Science, Psychology, Neuroscience, Computer Graphics to submit their work and attend the workshop. The type of contributions include but are not limited to:

• Review of existing work on the topic;
• Human behaviour studies in social context with virtual agents (virtual humans and robots);
• Cognitive models of sense of embodiment and telepresence, sense of agency, Proteus effect;
• Evaluation studies on the effect of embodiment on multi-modal interaction;
• Novel techniques for multi-sensory integration, including original perspectives (e.g., haptic, olfactory embodiment;
• Use cases and field applications.

In addition, for this second edition, we encourage researchers (including Master and PhD students) to submit experimental protocols for discussion as part of their future research. Submitting protocols will be an excellent opportunity to challenge new ideas and gather feedback from the community.

The topics of the submitted proposals can be use cases for the ExpIVA Tutorial, co-located with the ACE Workshop.

SUBMISSIONS INSTRUCTIONS

To submit to the workshop, please upload your paper to our EasyChair submission website at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ace_2024

Submissions should be anonymous and prepared using the predefined CEUR template (an Overleaf page for LaTeX users is also available). 

The accepted papers will be published in the workshop’s proceedings on CEUR Workshop Proceedings (http://ceur-ws.org/).

ACE 2024 accepts three types of submissions:

• Full papers: up to 8 pages, double column (plus references)
• Extended abstracts: up to 4 pages, double column (plus references)
• Protocols

All submissions should be in PDF-format.

CONFIRMED KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

   - Katja Zibrek, from Inria center at Rennes University, France, will give a keynote on the importance of animation in virtual human design. Creating a truly adaptive and responsive agent in VR is a considerably challenging endeavour, especially when striving to achieve a high level of appearance and behavioural realism. In this talk, Katja will explore some of the advances and limitations on agent non-verbal behaviour in the present literature and present her own research in this area.

   - Chloé Clavel, Senior Researcher in the ALMAnaCH team at INRIA Paris, will give a keynote on socio-conversational AI. A single lack of social tact on the part of a conversational system (chatbot, voice assistant, social robot) can lead to a decrease in the user’s trust and engagement in the interaction. This lack of social intelligence affects the willingness of a large audience to view conversational systems as acceptable. To understand the state of the user, in recent years the trend has shifted towards a monopoly of deep learning methods, which are quite powerful but opaque. Chloé will present research that aims to improve the explainability of the models as well as their transferability to new data and new socio-emotional phenomena.

ORGANISERS

- Beatrice Biancardi (CESI LINEACT)

- Eleonora Ceccaldi (CasaPaganini InfoMus, University of Genoa)

- Silvia Ferrando(CasaPaganini InfoMus, University of Genoa)

- Geoffrey Gorisse (LAMPA, Arts et Métiers Institute of Technology)

- Thomas Janssoone (Enchanted Tools)

- Anna Martin Coesel(CESI LINEACT)

- Pierre Raimbaud (ENISE, Ecole Centrale de Lyon)

Best regards,