Society for the Social Study of Mobile Communications


The Society for the Social Study of Mobile Communication (SSSMC) is intended to facilitate the international advancement of cross-disciplinary mobile communication studies. It is intended to serve as a resource and to support a network of scholarly research as to the social consequences of mobile communication.




Saturday, June 14, 2014

CFP: Models of Culture for Intelligent Virtual Agents (MoCIVA)

Call for Papers: Models of Culture for Intelligent Virtual Agents (MoCIVA)
Call for short and long papers for first MoCIVA workshop co-located with Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA) in Boston, MA – August 27th – 29th. Submissions due June 24th.
General page:  http://gaips.inesc-id.pt/mociva/
Link to submission details:  http://gaips.inesc-id.pt:8081/mociva/index.php/submission
Position papers: 2 pages
Short papers: 4-6 pages
Long papers: 10-12 pages
MoCIVA topics
MoCIVA aims to provide a forum for continued discussion and dissemination of results on several topics related to culture and virtual agents including:
  • Culture-specific virtual agents and robots
  • Agents for teaching cultures, or cross-cultural interaction
  • Models of culture that could be or have been used in virtual agents
  • Architectures that could be or have been used in culturally-aware virtual agents
  • Cross-cultural and inter-cultural data collection methods that can inform agent models
  • Culture-specific or cross-cultural human-agent interactions
  • Evaluation methods and metrics for human-agent models of culture
  • Simulating cultural differences
Applications of building models of culture that may affect task performance, e.g., managing cross-cultural interaction, teaching cultural models to, e.g., soldiers or international students, teaching cross-cultural interaction)
Important dates and contact information
June 24thth – Submissions due
July 10th – Notifications
August 1st – final papers due
August 26th – workshop
Email Birgit Endrass with questions about paper submissions:  birgit.endrass@uni-wuerzburg.de (Please put “IVA: Cultural Models” in subject heading.)
Committee:  http://gaips.inesc-id.pt:8081/mociva/index.php/committees
MoCIVA Motivations and Goals
Since humans use their own cultures as a frame of reference for producing and interpreting behavior and interaction, culture is an unavoidable part of human-human and human-intelligent virtual agent interaction. We would argue that there is no such thing as a virtual agent without a culture model, since culture is by its very definition the practices and behaviors that we take for granted, and therefore designers of agents most often incorporate their own cultural models. These unexamined design decisions may cause problems in the interaction in ways that lead us to reflect on how to design models of culture for human-agent interaction. In addition, an increasing number of the applications served by virtual agents require models of culture for intercultural interaction and/or for teaching intercultural interaction. The presentations and discussions in this workshop target the design decisions we make in designing, implementing, and deploying intelligent virtual agents that must operate in the real world where culture is an important part of interaction.
Papers are invited that target intelligent virtual agents that must function in specific cultural environments where culture affects task performance, how to manage cross-cultural human-agent interaction, applications that use virtual agents to teach cultural models to, e.g., soldiers or international students who must function in cultures different from their own, applications that use agents to teach cross-cultural interaction. Topics may include models of culture that can be or have been used in virtual agents, computational architectures that can be or have been used in culturally-aware virtual agents, cross-cultural and inter-cultural data collection methods that have or can inform agent models, applications that have or can be deployed for culture-specific or cross-culturally aware intelligent virtual agents, human-agent interactions, evaluation methods and metrics for human-agent models of culture.