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               WORKSHOP ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PAPERS

      Achieving Human-Like Behavior in Interactive Animated Agents

                            June 3, 2000
                          Barcelona, Spain

                         in conjunction with 
       The Fourth International Conference on Autonomous Agents
                  http://www.iiia.csic.es/agents2000

Workshop objectives
-------------------

For more than 50 years, skilled artists have achieved surprisingly 
human-like behavior in animated characters. Similar quality has yet to
be achieved in animated agents that can interact dynamically with
their users and their environment. This workshop will bring together  
leading researchers in this area to assess the state of the art,
identify key research issues, and share new ideas. 

The last ten years have seen exciting new applications of animated 
agents and rapid progress in the underlying technology.  Animated
conversational agents coordinate nonverbal communicative behavior with
spoken dialogue to make human-computer interfaces more like
face-to-face conversation. Presentation agents integrate these
conversational skills and the use of visual aids into compelling
multimedia presentations. Animated pedagogical agents combine such
conversational and presentational skills with the ability to monitor
students' problem solving in interactive learning environments.
Agents cohabit virtual worlds with people to serve as companions,
teammates, or adversaries.  In all these applications, animated agents
may appear as realistic humans, as animals, or as fictional creatures,
but they all share one thing in common: they attempt to mimic human
interactional behavior. 

While animated characters in the movies can rely on handcrafted
behavior created by skilled artists, interactive animated agents must
be driven by general computational models that produce appropriate
behavior in a wide range of situations.  Operating in real time, 
they must react appropriately to people and other agents, and they
must interact with objects in the virtual world without the
assumptions of a static environment and laborious keyframe
animation. The focus of this workshop is on the technical challenges
of designing such computational models of human-like behavior, and in
the  utilization of such models to create realistic, expressive, and 
seamless agent behavior.  Behavior models include such things as
locomotion, gaze, gestures, object manipulations, facial displays, and
emotional expression. Examples of possible technical issues for
discussion include 
- effective combinations of inverse kinematics, motion capture, and 
  keyframe animation
- believable blending of different movements and transitions between
  them
- principles for action selection that ensure coherence in an agent's
  behavior
- methods for ensuring that automatically generated behaviors meet 
  sufficiently high artistic and production standards
- coordinated generation of verbal and nonverbal behaviors
- timing and synchronization of nonverbal communicative movements with
  speech
- behavior models that take into account the personality and emotional
  state of the agent
- tools and methods for authoring interactive animated agents for new 
  virtual worlds and applications

Workshop format
---------------

The workshop will be organized as a series of presentations and
panels. The presentations will be split into three areas:
- Assessments of the state of the art for some aspect of interactive 
  animated agents.  For example, such a talk may focus on locomotion, 
  gaze, gesture, or facial movements.  These talks will be given
  sufficient time (e.g., 30-45 minutes) to clearly present the
  capabilities and limitations of existing techniques.
- Analysis of existing systems. These talks will briefly describe 
  particular interactive animated agents that have been designed 
  and implemented, focusing on design criteria, lessons learned, 
  and key technical challenges that remain beyond the state of the
  art. 
- Innovative new ideas. The workshop will include a limited number of
  talks that present particularly novel solutions to central problems
  in developing interactive animated agents.  The length of these
  talks will lie somewhere between the longer state-of-the-art talks 
  and the shorter systems talks.

All papers and talks should focus on computational models that control
the outward behavior of animated agents.  We welcome discussions of 
applications areas, studies of human behavior, models of agent
cognition, and techniques for multimodal input only as they relate to 
controlling the outward behavior of animated agents. By maintaining
this focus for the workshop, we hope to achieve a more coherent
discussion aimed at the critical technical issues required for
continued progress in the field. 

Submission requirements
-----------------------

Attendance at the workshop will be by invitation only.  People
interested in attending the workshop without giving a talk should
submit a one- or two-page description of their research interests.
People interested in giving a talk should submit a paper summarizing
the content of their proposed talk.  The paper should not exceed 5
pages (using 11pt and reasonable margins), and it should include 
references to other papers in this area by the authors.  All
submissions will be reviewed by at least two members of the program
committee.    

Submissions should be emailed to Jeff Rickel (rickel@isi.edu) in 
plain text or PDF format by March 17.  If email is not possible, a
hard copy can be sent to Dr. Rickel at the following address:
                     
        4676 Admiralty Way, Suite 1001
        Marina del Rey, CA 90292

Authors are highly encouraged to send a VHS video of their work or a
pointer to a video that is available on the Web.   

Note: Workshop participants will be required to register for the
Agents 2000 main conference.

Important dates
---------------

March 17, 2000 - Deadline for submission of papers to workshop chair
March 31, 2000 - Invitations for workshop sent out
June 3, 2000   - Tentative date for workshop


Organizing committee
--------------------

Jeff Rickel, USC Information Sciences Institute, USA (chair)
W. Lewis Johnson, USC Information Sciences Institute, USA 
James Lester, North Carolina State University, USA

Program committee
-----------------

Elisabeth Andre, DFKI, Germany
Norman Badler, University of Pennsylvania, USA 
Gene Ball, Microsoft, USA 
Justine Cassell, MIT Media Lab, USA 
Sonu Chopra, Lockheed Martin/GES, USA 
W. Lewis Johnson, USC Information Sciences Institute, USA 
James Lester, North Carolina State University, USA 
Dominic Massauro, University of California at Santa Cruz, USA 
Catherine Pelachaud, Universita di Roma "La Sapienza," Italy 
Jeff Rickel, USC Information Sciences Institute, USA 
Daniel Thalmann, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Switzerland
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