CFP: Workshop on Empathic Agents

DESCRIPTION Believability has been one of the most debated properties of intelligent agents and synthetic characters and the goal of the researchers working on this area for many years now. Aiming at characters that give the illusion of life allowing the user's suspension of disbelief, believability is still the Holy Grail of the area. However, when we watch a film, or read a book, we do not only suspend our disbelief and look at the characters as "life", but we also establish emotional relations with the characters. We feel sad when they are sad, angry when something unfair is done to our favourite character, and so on. That is, we put ourselves in the shoes of our favourite characters, and feel emotions for what is happening to them. Further, when agents interact with humans they too must be able to "understand" the user, and perhaps in a limited way, show certain emotions in reaction to human emotions GOALS The main goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers from different disciplines - psychology, HCI, robotics, graphics, animation, story-telling, AI - to discuss the creation of what we call 'empathic agents'. Empathy has been defined as 'an observer reacting emotionally because he perceives that another is experiencing or about to experience an emotion' (Stotland 1978). Humans, when interacting with agents can be led to feel empathy, and experience a diverse set of emotional reactions. On the other hand, agents can in a certain, perhaps limited way, also show certain emotions in reaction to human emotions, thus seemingly expressing empathy towards other agents and towards humans.  This workshop aims at exploring these two dimensions of what we call 'empathic agents'.  By trying to answer questions such as: how can intelligent agents evoke empathic emotional reactions in human users? Under what kinds of conditions  might one want an agent to respond to the emotions of a human (user)?  Or Can intelligent agents react empathically to human emotions? we will try to open a new area of research in  Intelligent Agents that looks at ways by which we create intelligent emotional agents that can enter into empathic relations with humans and other agents. TOPICS OF INTEREST The topics of interest of the workshop (but not limited to) are as follows: * Rationality and empathy for intelligent agents * Agent architectures for empathic agents * Models of empathy * Emotion modeling for empathic agents * User modeling for empathic agents * Social agents and empathy * Inter-agent communication and empathy * Expressions of Synthetic Characters for Empathic interactions * Empathy and non-verbal behaviour in Synthetic Characters * Agents embodiment and empathy * Empathic Synthetic Speech in Synthetic Agents * Empathy and believability in synthetic agents * Applications to health and education * Intelligent Narrative and Empathy triggering * Evaluating empathy in humans and agents * Entertainment applications * Empathic robots * Evaluating human empathic reaction to artificial agents ORGANISATION OF THE WORKSHOP The workshop will be a half-day workshop organized into two main parts. The first part will cover a mix of presentations and demonstrations done by by the speakers of the accepted papers. All these researchers will try to answer a set of questions raised by the organizers, and the sessions time will allow for broad and deep discussions on the topics.  The second part will be mainly discussion trying to reach some agreement on the questions raised. Researchers can submit papers for the workshop focusing the topics of interest of the workshop stating clearly how they can contribute to the theme proposed and questions posed. SUBMISSION DETAILS: All submissions must include: title, author(s) name(s), affiliation(s), mailing and electronic addresses, and telephone and fax numbers. They should be sent by e-mail (ASCII or URL from which your contribution can be downloaded are preferred; otherwise attached PDF, UNIX-compatible postscript, or RTF file) to: Ana Paiva Email: ana.paiva@inesc-id.pt Papers submission: 1st of April 2004 Acceptance Notification: 1st of May 2004 Camera ready contribution: 15th of May 2004 ORGANISING COMMITTEE Primary contact: Ana Paiva (P) INESC-ID and Instituto Superior Técnico, Av. Prof. Cavaco Silva, Tagus Park, 2780-990  Porto Salvo, Portugal. Email: ana.paiva@inesc.pt Prof. Ruth Aylett (UK) Professor of Intelligent Virtual Environments Centre for Virtual Environments, Business House, University of Salford Salford, M5 4WT, UK Email: R.S.Aylett@salford.ac.uk Stacy Marsella (USA) Research Scientist / Project Leader USC Information Sciences Institute 4676 Admiralty Way, Suite 1001 / Marina del Rey, CA 90292 Email: marsella@isi.edu   PROGRAM COMMITTEE Elisabeth AndrÈ (G) Ruth Aylett (UK) Cynthia Breazeal (USA) Cristiano Castelfranchi (IT) Helder Coelho (P) Cristina  Conatti (CA) Bridget Cooper (UK) Kerstin Dautenhahn (UK) Fiorella di Rosis (IT) Jonathan Gratch (USA) Kristina Höök (SE) Stacy Marsella (USA) Andrew Ortony (USA) Ana Paiva (P) Catherine Pelachaud (F) Ken Perlin (USA) Paolo Petta (AU) Helmut Prendinger (J) Thomas Rist (G) Harald Shaub (G) Daniel Thalmann (S)

Ruth Aylett MACS, Heriot-Watt University

Key research interests: Emotion as an integrating factor between reflection and reaction in agents; the functional role of emotion; emotions as emergent phenomena; emotion as a regulator and search heuristic in planning; emotion and emergent narrative; empathy

What	Public
When	Monday, 19 July 2004 to Tuesday, 20 July 2004
Where	AAMAS, NewYork
Contact Name	Ana Paiva
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