Socially Intelligent Agents

Socially Intelligent Agents - The Human in the Loop
AAAI Fall Symposium, 3-5 November 2000, Sea Crest Resort, North Falmouth, MA, USA.

If you would like to see the contents of the Proceedings (Technical Report FS-00-04) and/or order a copy from AAAI then please go to AAAI Press.

Summaries of the following working groups are now online:

Narrative Environments (organised by Ruth Aylett, presented at the symposium by Lewis Johnson), Powerpoint Presentation
Social intelligence in face-to-face interaction (Tim Bickmore), Powerpoint Presentation
Emotions in Social Interactions (Dolores Cañamero), HTML file
Ethical/health implications of SIA's (William L. Jarrold), Powerpoint Presentation
Socially intelligent robotic toys for children: applications in entertainment and therapy (Aude Billard, Kerstin Dautenhahn), HTML file
The interaction between social and cognitive processes (Bruce Edmonds), HTML file

Discussions at the symposium are summarised here.

Submission Deadline: 29th March 2000 (past)
List of Accepted Contributions for the Symposium Proceedings
Program
Important Information for Contributors to the proceedings that will be published as a AAAI Technical Report: Deadline for the submission of the following material is the
10 August 2000.
- Send two(!) camera-ready hardcopies of final paper to symposium chair, formatted in AAAI format (address of symposium chair is listed below on this Webpage). Maximum page length as specified in e-mail notification. Formatting guidelines are specified here.
- A/V request forms (please send hardcopy to symposium chair)
- Permission to distribute forms (Complete, sign and return to symposium chair. Without this document the paper can't be published)
- Submission of electronic abstracts to AAAI (this is independent of the submission of the hardcopies for the proceedings, see guidelines for electronic submissions here.) Please submit the electronic abstract via the form at http://www.aaai.org/Publications/Author/abstract-form.html. Symposium title is F5: Socially Intelligent Agents - The Human in the Loop.
  Information about electronic submission to AAAI, formatting guidelines and links to download the A/V and "Permission to Distribute" forms can be found here.
Submission of electronic papers to symposium chair (K.Dautenhahn@herts.ac.uk) by 21st of August 2000. PDF or PostScript files should be set up using letter size (8.5 x 11 inches) as the default page size - not A4, and all fonts must be embedded, recommended are Times, Symbol, and/or Helvetica fonts.
Information for presenters of posters (which are an integral part of the symposium and will be presented on all three days): The posters will be displayed on 30" x 40" foam core boards. Boards, push-pins, and also easels will be provided. The poster board is 30" across and 40" down. Poster presenters are welcome to position the board either way on the easels.
Deadline for a Special Issue of the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (JASSS) on Starting from Society - the application of social analogies to computational systems is 1st of September 2000.
New: Deadline for a Special issue of the IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part A: Systems and Humans on Socially Intelligent Agents - The Human in the Loop is 15th of December 2000.
General Information on Socially Intelligent Agents

Call for Participation:

The highly interdisciplinary area of Socially Intelligent Agents has attracted a number of active researchers who model, design and analyse agents (software or robotic) which behave socially. Much of this work is strongly inspired by forms of natural social intelligence characteristic of humans. This symposium will address recent technological, methodological and theoretical developments in the field of Socially Intelligent Agents (SIA's), as well as discuss social and cultural issues, and limitations and problems of Socially Intelligent Agents. A focus will be the issue of the 'human-in-the-loop'.
Both agents and humans can have different roles during agent-human interaction, e.g. as designers, users, observers, assistants, collaborators, competitors, customers, or friends. The symposium will concentrate primarily on socially intelligent agents that are either directly interacting with humans, showing aspects of human-style intelligence, supporting interaction among humans and/or modelling explicitly aspects of human social intelligence.
The symposium will focus on four Key Themes for which considerations of the 'human-in-the-loop' are crucial. Interdisciplinary approaches are particularly encouraged.
The symposium will comprise keynote talks, panel discussions and individual paper presentations, addressing one or several of the following Key Themes:

1) Connecting to SIA's: architectures and design spaces for SIA's; innovative user-interfaces, novel environments and new methodologies for software and robotic agents interacting and collaborating with humans and facilitating communication and collaboration between humans; hot approaches (emotional, empathic aspects) and cold approaches (intention and plan ascription, reasoning etc.); synchronisation in human-agent dialogue; the role of embodiment in human-agent interaction; exploiting anthropomorphism; believability and degrees of agent complexity
2) Learning and playing with SIA's: new applications of social agent technology in rehabilitation and education; SIA's as instructors, guides, teachers, assistants and friends; SIA's which support human creativity and imagination; SIA's in living environments (e.g. at school, at home, at work, on holiday, at meeting points)
3) Living with SIA's: social agent technology which influences attitudes/opinions/behaviour; issues of 'social relationships' between human and agent e.g. helping, competition and cooperation, autonomy and control, predictability, deception, manipulation, initiative, delegation, responsibility, conflicts
4) Growing up and evolving with SIA's: social agent technology which empowers humans, addressing the cognitive and emotional needs of humans; impact of SIA's on human society and culture; agents adapting to and supporting cultural diversity; ethical considerations

Submission Information

Potential participants are asked to submit a short paper (3 to 5 pages) describing their work in this area. Please send submissions via electronic mail to Kerstin Dautenhahn at K.Dautenhahn@herts.ac.uk. The text can either be submitted in plain Ascii format (preferred), or the submission can be made available on a Webpage and the URL is sent via email.

Important Dates:

Deadline for submission of abstracts: 29th of March 2000
Notification of acceptance/rejection: 25th of May 2000
Camera-ready copies of papers: 10th August 2000

Organizing committee

Elisabeth Andre, DFKI GmbH, Germany
Ruth Aylett, University of Salford, UK
Cynthia Breazeal, MIT AI Lab, USA
Cristiano Castelfranchi, Italian National Research Council, Italy
Justine Cassell, MIT Media Lab, USA
Kerstin Dautenhahn (Chair), University of Hertfordshire, UK
Francois Michaud, Universite de Sherbrooke, Canada
Fiorella de Rosis, University of Bari, Italy

Kerstin Dautenhahn, 5/10/2000