Intelligent Virtual Agents [electronic resource] : 6th International Conference, IVA 2006, Marina Del Rey, CA; USA, August 21-23, 2006, Proceedings /

Social Impact of IVAs -- Why Fat Interface Characters Are Better e-Health Advisors -- Virtual Rapport -- IVAs Recognizing Human Behavior -- Imitation Learning and Response Facilitation in Embodied Agents -- Robust Recognition of Emotion from Speech -- Affect Detection from Human-Computer Dialogue with an Intelligent Tutoring System -- Exploitation in Affect Detection in Improvisational E-Drama -- Human Interpretation of IVA Behavior -- An Exploration of Delsarte’s Structural Acting System -- Perception of Blended Emotions: From Video Corpus to Expressive Agent -- Perceiving Visual Emotions with Speech -- Embodied Conversational Agents -- Dealing with Out of Domain Questions in Virtual Characters -- MIKI: A Speech Enabled Intelligent Kiosk -- Architecture of a Framework for Generic Assisting Conversational Agents -- A Comprehensive Context Model for Multi-party Interactions with Virtual Characters -- “What Would You Like to Talk About?” An Evaluation of Social Conversations with a Virtual Receptionist -- Characteristics of Nonverbal Behavior -- Gesture Expressivity Modulations in an ECA Application -- Visual Attention and Eye Gaze During Multiparty Conversations with Distractions -- Behavior Representation Languages -- Towards a Common Framework for Multimodal Generation: The Behavior Markup Language -- MPML3D: A Reactive Framework for the Multimodal Presentation Markup Language -- Generation of Nonverbal Behavior with Speech -- Creativity Meets Automation: Combining Nonverbal Action Authoring with Rules and Machine Learning -- Nonverbal Behavior Generator for Embodied Conversational Agents -- [HUGE]: Universal Architecture for Statistically Based HUman GEsturing -- A Story About Gesticulation Expression -- IVAs in Serious Games -- Introducing EVG: An Emotion Evoking Game -- Towards a ReactiveVirtual Trainer -- Making It Up as You Go Along – Improvising Stories for Pedagogical Purposes -- Cognition and Emotion I -- A Neurobiologically Inspired Model of Personality in an Intelligent Agent -- Feeling Ambivalent: A Model of Mixed Emotions for Virtual Agents -- Are Computer-Generated Emotions and Moods Plausible to Humans? -- Creating Adaptive and Individual Personalities in Many Characters Without Hand-Crafting Behaviors -- Cognition and Emotion II -- Thespian: Modeling Socially Normative Behavior in a Decision-Theoretic Framework -- Autobiographic Knowledge for Believable Virtual Characters -- Teachable Characters: User Studies, Design Principles, and Learning Performance -- Applications of IVAs -- FearNot’s Appearance: Reflecting Children’s Expectations and Perspectives -- Populating Reconstructed Archaeological Sites with Autonomous Virtual Humans -- Evaluating the Tangible Interface and Virtual Characters in the Interactive COHIBIT Exhibit -- Invited Talks -- Invited Talk: Rule Systems and Video Games -- Invited Talk: Façade: Architecture and Authorial Idioms for Believable Agents in Interactive Drama -- Invited Talk: Social Effects of Emotion: Two Modes of Relation Alignment -- Posters -- Computer Model of Emotional Agents -- Affective Robots as Mediators in Smart Environments -- Expression of Emotion in Body and Face -- Towards Primate-Like Synthetic Sociability -- Here Be Dragons: Integrating Agent Behaviors with Procedural Emergent Landscapes and Structures -- Virtual Pedagogical Agents: Naturalism vs. Stylization -- The Role of Social Norm in User-Engagement and Appreciation of the Web Interface Agent Bonzi Buddy -- Countering Adversarial Strategies in Multi-agent Virtual Scenarios -- Avatar’s Gaze Control to Facilitate Conversational Turn-Taking in Virtual-SpaceMulti-user Voice Chat System -- The Role of Discourse Structure and Response Time in Multimodal Communication -- The PAC Cognitive Architecture -- Control of Avatar’s Facial Expression Using Fundamental Frequency in Multi-user Voice Chat System -- Modeling Cognition with a Human Memory Inspired Advanced Neural Controller -- Storytelling – The Difference Between Fantasy and Reality -- A Plug-and-Play Framework for Theories of Social Group Dynamics -- Learning Classifier Systems and Behavioural Animation of Virtual Characters -- Using Intelligent Agents to Facilitate Game Based Cultural Familiarization Training -- Mind the Body -- CAB: A Tool for Interoperation Among Cognitive Architectures.

The origin of the Intelligent Virtual Agents conference dates from a successful workshop on Intelligent Virtual Environments held in Brighton, UK at the 13th European Conference on Arti?cial Intelligence (ECAI’98). This workshop was followed by a second one held in Salford in Manchester, UK in 1999.Subsequent events took place in Madrid, Spain in 2001, Isree, Germany in 2003 and Kos, Greece in 2005. Starting in 2006, Intelligent Virtual Agents moved from being a biennial to an annual event and became a full ?edged international conference, hosted in California. This volume contains the proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, IVA 2006, held in Marina del Rey, California, USA from August 21–23.For the second year in a row,IVA also hosted the Gathering of Animated Lifelike Agents (GALA 2006), an annual festival to showcase the latest animated lifelike agents created by university students and academic or industrial research groups. IVA 2006 received 73 submissions from Europe, the AmericasandAsia.Thepaperspublishedherearethe24fullpapersand11short papers presented at the conference, as well as one-page descriptions of posters and the featured invited talks by Brian Parkinson of Oxford University, Rod Humble of Electronic Arts, and Michael Mateas of the University of California, Santa Cruz and Andrew Stern of Procedural Arts.