Call for Papers

       AAMAS 09 Workshop on Empathic Agents

       http://gaips.inesc-id.pt/aamas09-ea/

     Papers submission: 12th of February 2009

Creating characters and robots that give the illusion of life
and allow for the user's suspension of disbelief is still a
debated and fundamental goal in the area of virtual agents.
However, when we read a book, or watch a film we 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 hero, and so on. That is, we put ourselves in the
shoes of our favourite characters, and feel emotions for what is
happening to them. And these emotional empathic relations are
part of achieving that suspension of disbelief.

This workshop will be a meeting point to discuss the
creation of agents that are both empathic towards their
users and foster empathic reactions towards them by their users.
This workshop will be the second on this topic; the first one was
organized in 2004 in New York at the AAMAS conference.

This workshop will be part of the 8th International Conference
on Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent systems (AAMAS),  to be held
in Budapest Hungary on May 10-15, 2009. Details on the
conference can be found here.

**Topics of Interest

The topics of interest of the workshop (but not limited to) are as follows:

   * Models of empathy
   * Empathy for rational agents
   * Architectures for empathic agents and robots
   * Emotion modeling for empathic agents and robots
   * User modeling for empathic agents and robots
   * Social robots and social agents and empathy
   * Inter-agent communication and empathy
   * Expression of Virtual Agents for Empathic interactions
   * Empathy and facial expressions in Virtual Agents
   * Empathic Synthetic Speech for Virtual Agents
   * Applications to health and social education
   * Interactive Storytelling and Empathy
   * Entertainment and Education applications
   * Empathy and long term interactions with virtual agents and robots
   * Evaluating empathy in agents and robots
   * Evaluating human empathic reactions to artificial agents and robots

**Organisation of the workshop

The workshop will be a full-day workshop organized into two main parts .
We expect the first part to cover a mix of presentations focusing on
theoretical and empirical studies motivating the creation of empathic agents.
During this part we may include an invited speaker.
The second part will consist mainly of the presentation of papers
and a general discussion trying to reach some agreement on the answers
raised at the beginning of the workshop. 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.

**Submission

Researchers are invited to submit papers for the workshop focusing
the topics of interest of the workshop stating clearly how they can
contribute to the themes proposed. Papers should be no longer than 8 pages.
Papers should be submitted by email to ana.paiva@inesc-id.pt,
bickmore@ccs.neu.edu and marsella@isi.edu .

Authors should follow the format of AAMAS submissions.

**Dates

Papers submission: 12th of February 2009

Acceptance Notification: 1st of March 2009

Camera Ready: 15th of March 2009

**Organising Committee

Timothy Bickmore (USA)
Stacy Marsella (USA)
Ana Paiva (PT)

** Program Committee
Catherine Pelachaud (F)
Paolo Petta (AU)
Helmut Prendinger (J)
Lynne Hall (UK)
Sibylle Enz (D)
Magalie Ohs (F)
Ruth Aylett (UK)
Kerstin Dautenhahn (UK)
Ian Hornswill (USA)
Elisabeth Andre (D)
Eva Hudlicka (USA)
Joao Dias (P)