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Special Issue of the Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces:

INTERACTING WITH EMBODIED CONVERSATIONAL AGENTS
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GUEST EDITORS:
Elisabeth André, Institute of Informatics, Augsburg University, Germany;
andre@informatik.uni-augsburg.de
Marc Cavazza, School of Computing, University of Teesside, UK; m.o.cavazza@tees.ac.uk
Catherine Pelachaud, CNRS – LTCI, Télécom ParisTech, France;
Catherine.Pelachaud@telecom-paristech.fr

OVERVIEW:
Despite advances in enhancing the expressivity of embodied
conversational agents (ECAs), communication with ECAs remains an
unnatural experience due to an often encountered asymmetry in
communication channels, in which user input modalities tend to be less
sophisticated due to the limitation of input processing. This is
becoming a limiting factor as virtual actors become an essential element
of computer games, intelligent tutoring systems and new media such as
Interactive Storytelling. Furthermore, user-agent communication should
be properly situated in the context of the application at hand rather
than isolated as a laboratory experiment. In addition, interaction with
ECAs implicitly creates a social environment which requires mechanisms
for recognizing the user’s affective, attentive and social cues. This
special issue will provide the opportunity to present research on the
integration of speech, vision and other non-verbal sensors into an ECA's
conversational model. We specifically welcome research taking place
within realistic scenarios or applications (entertainment, tutoring
systems, persuasive systems, Interactive Narrative).

IMPORTANT DATES:
- Deadline for paper submission: 26th November 2010
- Notification of acceptance: 10th January 2011
- Camera-ready version of accepted papers: 25th February 2011
- Publication date: April/May 2011

We invite submissions of research papers that consider at least one
input channel to ECAs and address the following areas (but not limited to):
• Integration of speech, vision and other sensor-based technologies in
dialogue understanding for ECAs
• Perception and interpretation of affective, social and attentive cues
from users during human-agent dialogue
• Perception-based models of grounding and turn-taking
• Alignment and synchrony of perceptive and expressive behaviors in
human-agent dialogue
• Natural language dialogue with ECAs in augmented and mixed realities
• Applications that emulate characteristics of human-agent dialogue,
such as games and interactive storytelling
• Empirical studies that explore the potential benefits of speech,
vision and other sensor-based technologies for human-agent-communication

INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS:
Submissions should be 8 to 12 pages long and must be written in English.
Formatting instructions and templates are available on: http://www.jmui.org

Authors should register and upload their submission on the following
website: http://www.editorialmanager.com/jmui/
During the submission process, please select “SI (Special Issue) -
Interacting ECAs” as article type.

Authors are encouraged to send to: andre@informatik.uni-augsburg.de a
brief email indicating their intention to participate as soon as
possible, including their contact information and the topic they intend
to address in their submissions.

The Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces is a publication of
OpenInterface (www.openinterface.org)
Editor in Chief: Jean-Claude Martin
Founding Editor: Benoit Macq
More information on www.springer.com/12193 or www.jmui.org
Online content: www.springerlink.com