I am co-organizing a workshop about using Virtual Agents for social skills training. The call for papers:
Virtual Agents for Social Skills Training (VASST) Workshop @ INTETAIN 2016
The VASST workshop at the INTETAIN 2016 conference aims to give an overview of recent developments of interactive virtual agent applications that are intended for training the social skills of the user. Here a virtual agent takes the role of a training actor in a role-playing exercise enabling the user to practice his or her social skills. This technology requires thorough knowledge from multiple research domains, e.g., (serious) game mechanics, human factors, (social) signal processing, user-specific feedback mechanisms, and artificial intelligence. When successfully combined, these novel interaction paradigms can impact the serious gaming industry.
We welcome small, innovative, unpublished research describing the state-of-the-art for all factors relevant to interaction with VASST, such as literature studies, user studies, design concepts and position papers.
The range of relevant topics includes, but is not limited to:
- Dialogues with virtual agents;
- The use of big data approaches to investigate and enrich interactions;
- Recognition and interpretation of nonverbal social behaviours;
- Design of feedback to improve user performance;
- Social-emotional & cognitive computational models;
- User profiling;
- Knowledge representations of virtual agents and automatic improvement of these representations based on interactions;
- Other topics dealing with innovations for VASST.
Workshop Organizers
Merijn Bruijnes – University of Twente, the Netherlands
Jeroen Linssen – University of Twente, the Netherlands
Program Committee
Merijn Bruijnes, UT
Jeroen Linssen, UT
Tibor Bosse, VU
Joost Broekens, TUD
Marieke Peeters, 3TU H&T
Isabel Alexandre, ISCTE Portugal
Important Dates
Deadline for submissions: 30 March, 2016
Deadline for position papers: 1 June, 2016
Notification of acceptance: 15 June, 2016
Workshop: afternoon 30 June, 2016
Submission
All papers will undergo a regular reviewing process by members of the workshop’s program committee. Papers should be formatted according to Springer LNICTS Author’s Kit with a 4-page limit, excluding references. See the website http://www.intetain.org/2016/show/authors-kit for instructions. Papers should be sent to Jeroen Linssen (j.m.linssen at utwente dot nl).
Position papers will not be included in the Proceedings of INTETAIN. They can contain up to 10 pages, excluding references. All outstanding accepted papers will be invited to submit to a special issue on VASST in a journal (e.g., JMUI or Simulation & Gaming).