Call for Papers

The Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA) Annual Conference is the premier international event for interdisciplinary research on the design, application, and evaluation of Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) with a specific focus on the ability to socially interact. IVAs are interactive characters that exhibit human-like qualities including communicating using natural human modalities such as facial expressions, speech and gesture.

IVA 2021 will be held ONLINE as a Virtual Conference and is organized by the University of Fukuchiyama.

We invite submissions on cutting-edge research on the design, application, and evaluation of IVAs, as well as basic research on social perception, dialog modeling, and social behavior planning. We also welcome submissions on central theoretical issues, uses of virtual agents in psychological research and showcases of working applications. For a longer list of topics see the IVA 2021 website. Special theme topics include but are not limited to: experiments and methodological issues with Socially Interactive Agents (SIA) and HRI research when interaction is restricted (such as during Covid-19), IVAs for behavior change, IVAs for social inclusion/feelings of loneliness, mental helper IVAs, IVA’s for deliberation and information understanding, Cognitive aid IVA’s, and IVA aided education (remote) education. IVA 2021 offers three submission tracks. All accepted submission will be reviewed and included in the proceedings.

  • Full papers (7 pages, excluding 1 optional extra page for references only). Full papers should present significant, novel and substantial work of high quality that needs proceedings space to explain and replicate the work.

  • Extended Abstracts (2 pages, excluding 1 optional extra page for references only). Extended abstracts should either discuss the relevance for IVA of recently published important work by the authors, or early results, or standard studies and approaches that do not need significant proceedings space to explain and replicate.

  • Demos (2 pages, excluding 1 optional extra page for references only, a hyperlink to a video of the demo must be present in the pdf). Demo abstracts focus on demo-ability and application of an implemented system. Each demo should be accompanied by one demo submission.

All submission types (full papers, extended abstracts and demo submissions) will be double-blind peer-reviewed by the expert reviewer committee. Accepted submissions will be published in the IVA ACM proceedings, and all accepted papers must be presented at the conference. For each accepted contribution at least one of the authors must register for the conference. The presentation type will be either a poster or talk format depending on what is the most appropriate format for the paper. The authors can themselves choose a preferred presentation type but the final decision will be made by the program chairs. All posters have to be pitched during a plenary poster booster session (poster madness).

Besides the main conference presentations, IVA 2021 also features workshops, the GALA event and Doctoral Consortium. See a specific call for participation in these events, and the website for more details on the contributions to these events.

IVA features a unique submission process for full papers, extended abstracts and demos. Submissions that are of high quality but that need a revision according to the reviewers and SPC can be invited for a revised resubmission. This means that your notification will be either accept, reject or revise. Note that the revision deadline is only for papers with a revise decision. No new submissions or resubmissions of rejected submissions will be possible. Also note that a revision will be reviewed again, following either an accept or reject decision. All decisions are final.

Scope and List of Topics

IVA invites submissions on a broad range of topics, including but not limited to:

Agent Design and modeling of:

  • Cognition

  • Emotion (including personality and cultural differences)

  • Socially communicative behavior (e.g., of emotions, personality traits)

  • Conversational behavior

  • Social perception

  • Machine learning approaches to agent modeling

  • Approaches to realizing adaptive behavior

  • Models informed by theoretical and empirical research from psychology

Multimodal interaction:

  • Verbal and nonverbal behavior coordination

  • Face-to-face communication skills

  • Engagement

  • Managing co-presence and interpersonal relation

  • Multi-party interaction

  • Data driven multimodal modeling

Social agent architectures:

  • Design criteria and design methodologies

  • Engineering of real-time human-agent interaction

  • Standards / measures to support interoperability

  • Portability and reuse

  • Specialized tools, toolkits and tool chains

Evaluation methods and studies:

  • Evaluation methodologies and user studies

  • Ethical considerations and societal impact

  • Applicable lessons across fields (e.g. between robotics and virtual agents)

  • Social agents as a means to study and model human behavior

Applications:

  • Applications in education, skills training, health, counseling, games, art, etc.

  • Virtual agents in games and simulations

  • Social agents as tools in psychology

  • Migration between platforms

Special Theme

The special theme of IVA 2021 is: Intelligent Virtual Agents in Global Pandemic. COVID-19 has shown that interaction between users and socially intelligent agents is essential to improve the design of interactive applications and to support technology that aims at user-friendly socially competent solutions. Through deeper understanding of the mechanisms that underlie human cognition, emotion, and action in various human-human and human-agent interactive situations, it is possible to advance the state of the art, gain knowledge, and develop applications that address socially important issues such as how to counter feelings of loneliness or break information bubbles.

Instructions for Authors

Paper submissions should be anonymous and prepared in the “ACM Standard” format, more specifically the “SigConf” format.