DESCRIPTION:
You are invited to participate in this full day workshop which aims to bring together researchers 
from the embodied conversational agent (ECA) and sociable robotics communities to spark discussion 
and collaboration between the related fields. The focus of the workshop will be on co-verbal 
behavior production -- specifically, synchronized speech and gesture -- for virtually and 
physically embodied platforms. It will elucidate the subject in consideration of aspects 
regarding planning and realization of multimodal behavior production. Topics discussed will 
highlight common and distinguishing factors of their implementations within each respective 
field. The workshop will feature a panel discussion with experts from the relevant communities, 
and a breakout session encouraging participants to identify design and implementation principles 
common to both virtually and physically embodied sociable agents.


The workshop schedule, including the list of accepted papers and speakers, is available here:
http://robotics.usc.edu/~icmi/2012/schedule.php



TOPICS:
Under the focus of speech-gesture-based multimodal human-agent interaction, the workshop will 
address the following topics:
* Computational approaches to:
  - Content and behavior planning, e.g., rule-based or probabilistic models
  - Behavior realization for virtual agents or sociable robots (one or the other, or both)
* From ECAs to physical robots: potential and challenges of cross-platform approaches
* Behavior specification languages and standards, e.g., FML, BML, MURML
* Speech-gesture synchronization, e.g., open-loop vs. closed-loop approaches
* Situatedness within social/environmental contexts
* Feedback-based user adaptation
* Cognitive modeling of gesture and speech


INVITED SPEAKER: Stefan Kopp (Bielefeld University)


PANEL MEMBERS:
* Dan Bohus (Microsoft Research)
* Justine Cassell (Carnegie Mellon University) [Tentative]
* Stacy Marsella (USC Institute for Creative Technologies)
* Victor Ng-Thow-Hing (Honda Research Institute USA)


PROGRAM COMMITTEE:
* Dan Bohus (Microsoft Research)
* Kerstin Dautenhahn (University of Hertfordshire)
* Jonathan Gratch (USC Institute for Creative Technologies)
* Alexis Heloir (German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence)
* Takayuki Kanda (ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories)
* Jina Lee (Sandia National Laboratories)
* Stacy Marsella (USC Institute for Creative Technologies)
* Maja Matari? (University of Southern California)
* Louis-Philippe Morency (USC Institute for Creative Technologies)
* Bilge Mutlu (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
* Victor Ng-Thow-Hing (Honda Research Institute USA)
* Catherine Pelachaud (TELECOM ParisTech)


WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS:
* Ross Mead (University of Southern California)
* Maha Salem (Bielefeld University)


CONTACT:
* Workshop Questions (icmi2012ws.speech.gesture@gmail.com)
* Ross Mead (rossmead@usc.edu)
* Maha Salem (msalem@cor-lab.uni-bielefeld.de)