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 2022 aims to showcase cutting-edge research on the design, application, and evaluation of IVAs, as well as the basic research underlying the technology that supports human-agent interaction such as social perception, dialog modeling, and social behavior planning. This year, we particularly encourage submissions exploring the challenges of developing, authoring, and deploying multi-IVA reusable environments targeted both at expert and non-expert users.

IVA 2022 offers three submission tracks: Full Papers (7 pages + 1 additional page for references), Extended Abstracts (2 pages + 1 additional page for references), and Demos (2 pages + 1 additional page for references, a hyperlink to a video of the demo must be present in the pdf). We welcome and encourage the submission of early results and work in progress as Extended Abstracts.

All submissions will be double-blind peer-reviewed by a group of external expert reviewers. All accepted submissions will be published in the ACM proceedings. Accepted Full Papers and selected Extended Abstracts will be included in moderated panel sessions, spread out across the conference week. For each accepted contribution, at least one of the authors must register for the conference.

During the IVA submission process for full papers, extended abstracts, and demos, the authors will be given the opportunity to comment on the initial reviews written on their submissions, during a rebuttal period. The main purpose of the rebuttal period is to help the program committee to improve the quality and accuracy of the reviewing and decision process, by having the author point out potential omissions and mistakes (both conceptual and technical) in the reviews.

IVA 2022 will also feature workshops, the GALA event, and Doctoral Consortium. Please visit the corresponding pages for more details on the contributions to these events.

Please visit the Important Dates page for the details on the deadlines.

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 toolchains

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 IVA 2022 Topic

Developing, Authoring, and Deploying Multi-IVA Environments

Intelligent Virtual Agents, whether virtually or physically embodied, is a technology that has an enormous potential in a myriad of applications including tutoring, entertainment, medicine, and educational games. Research advances in how they perceive the environment, reason, and decide how to interact with other agents and humans have powered the creation of IVAs that act in an autonomous and socially intelligent way. Challenges exist in creating technology that can be reused and easily deployed in the most diverse contexts and applications by expert and non-expert users, with minimal authoring effort, allowing the author to focus only on the purpose of the IVA. IVA 2022 welcomes researchers and developers across disciplines to share their work on the challenges of developing, authoring, and deploying Multi-IVA Environments.

Types of Submission

    Full papers (7 pages + 1 additional page for references). 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 + 1 additional page for references). 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 + 1 additional page for references, 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.

Supplementary material: IVA 2022 does not contemplate the upload of supplementary material. If necessary to direct readers to supplemental data, we encourage authors to host such material in a public repository and add a link to it in the paper.