Michael Kipp - Böcker

Welcome to the proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, held September 14–16, 2009 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) are interactive characters that exhibit hum- like qualities and communicate with humans or with each other using natural human modalities such as speech and gesture. They are capable of real-time perception, cognition and action, allowing them to participate in a dynamic physical and social environment. IVA is an interdisciplinary annual conference and the main forum for p- senting research on modeling, developing and evaluating IVAs with a focus on communicative abilities and social behavior. The development of IVAs requires expertise in multimodal interaction and several AI ?elds such as cognitive m- eling, planning, vision and natural language processing. Computational models are typically based on experimental studies and theories of human–human and human–robot interaction; conversely, IVA technology may provide interesting lessons for these ?elds. The realization of engaging IVAs is a challenging task, so reusable modules and tools are of great value. The ?elds of application range from robot assistants, social simulation and tutoring to games and artistic - ploration.

Thebookpresentsa cross-sectionofstate-of-the-artresearchonmultimodalc- pora, a highly interdisciplinary area that is a prerequisite for various specialized disciplines. A number of the papers included are revised and expanded versions ofpapersacceptedtotheInternationalWorkshoponMultimodal Corpora:From Models of Natural Interaction to Systems and Applications, held in conjunction th with the 6 International Conference for Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC) on May 27, 2008, in Marrakech, Morocco. This international workshop series started in 2000 and has since then grown into a regular satellite event of the bi-annual LREC conference, attracting researchers from ?elds as diverse as psychology, arti?cial intelligence, robotics, signal processing, computational linguisticsandhuman-computerinteraction. Tocomplement theselected papers from the 2008 workshop, we invited well-known researchers from corpus coll- tioninitiativestocontributetothisvolume. Wewereabletoobtainseveninvited research articles, including contributions from major international multimodal corpus projects like AMI and SmartWeb, which complement the six selected workshop contributions.All papers underwent a special review process for this volume, resulting in signi?cant revisions and extensions based on the experts' advice. While we were pleased that the 2006 edition of the workshop resulted in a special issue of the Journal of Language Resources and Evaluation, published in 2007, we felt that this was the time for another major publication, given not onlytherapidprogressandincreasedinterestin this researchareabut especially in order to acknowledge the di?culty of disseminating results across discipline borders. The Springer LNAI series is the perfect platform for doing so. We also created the website www. multimodal-corpora.