Registration and abstract submission are now open for the fourth edition of the Seeing and Acting Workshop (SAW) that will take place at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences of the University of Coimbra, September 24-26, 2026 in Coimbra, Portugal.

Please register here: SAW 2026 – Seeing and Acting Workshop | Eventos | Universidade de Coimbra

For the fourth edition of SAW, we have, once again, an exciting and stimulating group of Invited Speakers:

·  Marina Bedny, Johns Hopkins University, USA

·  Jeffrey Bowers, University of Bristol, , UK

·  Tim Kietzmann, University of Osnabrück, Germany

·  Robeta Klatzky, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

·  Kami Koldewyn, Bangor University, UK

·  Marius Peelen, Radboud University, Netherlands

·  Elizabeth Tibbetts, University of Michigan, USA

The goal of SAW is to provide a forum for cognitive science/neuroscience researchers from a range of perspectives who are interested in Perception and Action, broadly construed, to come together to discuss their research and develop new directions and collaborations. The format of the workshop is intended to encourage extensive discussion among participants. To this end, we have scheduled only a small number of invited speakers, and there are no concurrent talks. In addition to the individual seminars, there will be a poster session for students, postdocs and other researchers to present their work.

Abstract submission for posters closes on July 30, 2026. The five best abstracts whose first author is a student or postdoc will receive a 200 euro award sponsored by NeuroVerse.

Registration for the workshop will be open in a couple of weeks. To register, submit a poster abstract, or for more information, please visit: https://www.uc.pt/cogbooster/saw/2026/ and SAW 2026 – Seeing and Acting Workshop | Eventos | Universidade de Coimbra

Please note that there are a limited number of places (~120), which will be assigned on a first come, first served basis. To secure your place, please register as soon as possible. Note that you can register now and submit an abstract later (but before the July 30, 2026 deadline).

SAW is powered by the ERA Chair CogBooster, and by the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences of the University of Coimbra, Portugal.

Workshop Organizers:

Jorge Almeida, Alfonso Caramazza, Paul Downing, Mel Goodale, Zoe Kourtzi, Angelika Lingnau, and Isabel Pavão Martins

📢 Call for Papers

The 7th Generation and Evaluation of Non-verbal Behaviour for Embodied Agents (GENEA) Workshop
October 5, 2026 (in person)
Held in conjunction with ACM ICMI 2026, Naples, Italy
Website: https://genea-workshop.github.io/2026/workshop/

We are pleased to share the Call for Papers for the 7th edition of the GENEA Workshop, focusing on the generation and evaluation of non-verbal behaviours such as gesticulation, facial expressions, and gaze – essential components of natural interaction with embodied agents, including virtual agents and social robots.

Currently, behaviour generation is typically powered by rule-based systems, data-driven approaches like generative AI, or hybrid models. For evaluation, both objective and subjective methods are used, though their application and validity are often debated. This workshop aims to bring together researchers from diverse disciplines working on various aspects of non-verbal behaviour generation, facilitating discussion on advancing both generation techniques and evaluation methodologies.

✨ Topics of Interest

We invite original contributions on topics including (but not limited to):

• Automated synthesis of facial expressions, gestures, and gaze movements, including multimodal synthesis

• Closed-loop / end-to-end non-verbal behaviour generation (from perception to action)

• Use of LLMs/VLMs in the context of non-verbal behaviour synthesis

• New datasets, annotation methods, and analyses of existing datasets related to non-verbal behaviour

• Cross-cultural and multilingual influences on non-verbal behaviour generation

• Cognitive and affective models for non-verbal behaviour generation

• Ethical considerations and biases in non-verbal behaviour synthesis

• Subjective and objective evaluation methods for any of the above topics

📝 Submission Types

We welcome:

• Long papers (8 pages)

• Short papers (4 pages)

All submissions should follow the double-column ACM conference format. Pages containing only references do not count toward the page limit. Papers must be submitted in PDF format via OpenReview and formatted for double-blind review. To encourage authors to make their work reproducible and reward the effort that this requires, we have introduced the GENEA Workshop Reproducibility Award. 

Accepted papers will be presented at the workshop and included in the ICMI companion proceedings.

🗓️ Important Dates (End of day, Anywhere on Earth)

• Paper abstract deadline: 2 July 2026

• Full submission deadline: 3 July 2026

• Notification of acceptance: 23 July 2026

• Camera-ready deadline: 31 July 2026

• Workshop date: 5 October 2026

👥 Organisers

• Taras Kucherenko – Electronic Arts (EA), Sweden

• Alice Delbosc – Davi, The Humanizers, France

• Gustav Eje Henter – KTH Royal Institute of Technology / Motorica AB, Sweden

• Oya Celiktutan – King’s College London, United Kingdom

• Eneko Atxa Landa – University of the Basque Country, Spain

• Jieyeon Woo – Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials, South Korea

• Haoyang Du – Technological University Dublin, Ireland

For more information, visit our website, contact us at genea-contact@googlegroups.com