The 17th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA 2017) was held on August 27-30 in Stockholm and I was there! The conference was organized by Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan (better known as KTH). I was involved in three publications!
On the first day, we were located in the beautiful campus of KTH, very Harry Potter-ish. There were several workshops on this day. I attended the workshop on Interaction with Agents and Robots: Different Embodiments, Common Challenges. In a break-out session, we had a very interesting discussion about the future of evaluating social agents.
Sadly, I had to miss the Monday for family reasons. This meant I missed the awesome demo that Jan and I prepared. We showcased our ASAP Realiser – Unity3D bridge by showing how we could send a BML to ASAP, which in turn controlled the behaviour of a virtual agent in Unity. Since Unity supports many devices it is relatively easy to make it run on any device. In our case, the virtual agent was running on a Hololens (an augmented reality device). See for more information our demo paper.
On Tuesday I was back. Just in time to cheer for Jan who presented our poster for the ASAP – Unity bridge. On this poster, and with the explanations, we tried to describe more of the technical details behind the integration, see also the poster paper. The picture is proof of the high interest from the IVA community for our work and for Jan’s awesome enthusiasm. Thanks, Jan!
Wednesday was the last day of the conference and on this day Angelo presented our work titled Selecting and Expressing Communicative Functions in a SAIBA-Compliant Agent Framework. Please take a look at the IVA short paper for more information.
It was really nice to again see ‘the people of IVA’. I really enjoyed the discussions and am looking forward to the next IVA, which is in…. Sidney! Wow, talk about motivation! I am going to submit some nice work and really hope that I’ll be allowed to go there.
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After the conference, Manon came over and we had a couple of nice couple-days in Stockholm!
