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ACE2023: how Artificial Character Embodiment shapes user behaviour in multi-modal interaction

Web page:  https://sites.google.com/view/ace2023workshop/home

IMPORTANT DATES:

·        Submission deadline: July 23, 2023

·        Notification to authors: August 6, 2023

·        Camera-ready: August 14, 2023

·        Workshop: October 13, 2023, Paris

MOTIVATION:

The body shapes the mind: bodily representations structure the way humans perceive the world and the way they perceive other people. Cognitive sciences and social sciences altogether have stressed the importance of embodiment in social interaction, highlighting how interacting with others influences how we behave, perceive and think. As the sense of embodiment can be defined as the ensemble of sensations that arise in conjunction with being inside, having, and controlling a body, it definitely influences self-perceptions and actions regarding one's own avatar, but also our social behaviours with embodied intelligent agents such as virtual humans and robots.

The topic is multidisciplinary by nature: embodiment can affect both human-human and human-agent (either virtual or robotic) interactions and this influence can arise through different sensory modalities. For instance, in virtual environments, users may experience what is known as the Proteus effect, a well-known phenomenon where the appearance of users' avatars influence their behaviour, but whose underlying cognitive processes are still not clear. In human-robot and human-agent interactions, the level of anthropomorphism can impact human reactions and behaviours during the interaction (e.g., uncanny valley of visual appearance or motions that disturb responses and sense of presence in virtual reality). These phenomena are not only of interest for the design of artificial characters, either virtual or robotic, but could also help to shed light on social behaviour and cognition, providing new tools and experimental perspectives.

The ACE workshop aims to bring together researchers, practitioners and experts on the topic of embodiment, to analyse and foster discussion on its effects on user behaviour in multi-modal interaction contexts. Objectives are to stimulate multidisciplinary discussions on the topic, to share recent progress, and to provide participants with a forum to debate current and future challenges. Contributions from computational, neuroscientific and psychological perspectives, as well as technical applications, will be welcomed.

We welcome both technical and theoretical contributions around the role of embodiment on multi-modal interaction. Their focus can be either on the user embodying an avatar or on one or several embodied artificial agents interacting with the user. We encourage researchers from different domains such as Computer Science, Psychology, Neuroscience, Computer Graphics to submit their work and attend the workshop. The type of contributions include but are not limited to:

·        Review of existing work on the topic;

·        Human behaviour studies in social context with virtual agents (virtual humans and robots);

·        Cognitive models of sense of embodiment and telepresence, sense of agency, Proteus effect;

·        Evaluation studies on the effect of embodiment on multi-modal interaction;

·        Novel techniques for multi-sensory integration, including original perspectives (e.g., haptic, olfactory embodiment;

·        Use cases and field applications.

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS

We invite submissions of both long papers (8 pages max., double column) and short papers (4 pages max., double column) formatted according to ICMI guidelines (please check https://icmi.acm.org/2023/guidelines-for-authors/ for more details).

To submit to the workshop, please upload your manuscript to our EasyChair submission website here: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ace2023

Each manuscript will be sent to at least two expert reviewers and will have one of the organisers assigned as editor. Please note that submissions are double-blind so all information giving away who the authors are must be eliminated from the submitted paper. Proceedings will be published as adjunct proceedings to the 25th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction.

CONFIRMED KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

·        Domna Banakou, from New York University Abu Dhabi will present her most recent work about immersive virtual reality and people's responses to events within these environments. Her main focus is the bodily representation in virtual reality, and the correlations between these body ownership illusions and their perceptions by the users.

ORGANISERS

·        Beatrice Biancardi (CESI LINEACT), bbiancardi@cesi.fr

·        Thomas Janssoone (Enchanted Tools)

·        Eleonora Ceccaldi (CasaPaganini InfoMus, University of Genoa)

·        Sara Falcone (University of Twente)

·        Geoffrey Gorisse (LAMPA, Arts et Métiers Institute of Technology)

·        Pierre Raimbaud (ENISE, Ecole Centrale de Lyon)

·        Anna Martin Coesel (CESI LINEACT)

·        Silvia Ferrando (CasaPaganini InfoMus, University of Genoa)

Best regards,