Proceedings of the 21th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents

Abstract

Welcome to the proceedings of the 21st ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA 2021). IVA is an annual interdisciplinary conference in which leading scientists worldwide present and discuss their latest work on socially intelligent virtual agents (IVAs). These agents are intelligent virtual characters or robots which humans can interact with. They often have anthropomorphic elements to evoke responses that humans would exhibit when interacting with other humans. For this, agents use natural human communication modalities such as speech, gestures, and facial expressions. Besides these interaction modalities, the agents are capable of real-time perception, artificial cognition, and actions in the social environment they operate in. Constructing and studying these IVAs requires knowledge, theories, methods, and tools from a wide range of fields such as computer science, psychology, cognitive sciences, communication, linguistics, interactive media, human-computer interaction, and artificial intelligence. All these disciplines are represented in these proceedings.