The goals of the "ECAs as Individuals" workshop are:

This workshop will bring both established and new researchers together to discuss the development, implementation and evaluation of ECAs as individuals , the current ECA state-of-the-art and to create a vision for the future of individual ECAs.

The origin of this workshop dates from a successful workshop on Embodied conversational agents - let's specify and evaluate them! for AAMAS 2002, Bologna in mid July 2002 and a special IST 5^th Framework meeting on Representation Formats/Languages.

The Workshop Organisers would welcome the submission of papers on substantial, original, and unpublished research on all aspects from the Major Topic areas. These include (but are not limited to)

The full day workshop will feature a mix of paper presentations, demonstrations, and discussion rounds. The presentations should cover one of the several academic or industrial themes of the workshop and should be oriented toward:

We especially invite papers/presentations/demonstrations of industrial ECA research and/or commercial ECA systems.

We strongly encourage you to demonstrate your work and to provide URLs to permanent web sites that contain examples of your system. To give us time to organize the technical requirements, if you are to demonstrate your system, we must be notified before 15^th April . Contact us for details at: raytrace@vhml.org

The workshop will conclude with a panel discussion of:

At the end of the workshop, participants should have a broad understanding of the differing technologies involved in the production, development and directing of "individualised ECAs". They will have seen several ECA systems and will understand the problems associated with the technology. They will have contributed, through discussion, to the future development of individual ECA interfaces within the global context. They will also become part of a network of ECA researchers and practitioners.

The collected papers will become part of a permanent web page for this workshop and hence all required permissions must be obtained by the authors for any copyright material in their papers.
The authors will retain copyright of their work.
In submitting a paper to the workshop, the authors must grant a non-exclusive licence to the workshop organisers to publish their paper and associated material in full on the World Wide Web and on CD-ROM and in printed form . Any other usage is prohibited without the express permission of the author.
Authors are encouraged to add a brief copyright notice to their paper.

Since we aim at a highly focused event on the aspect of individuality and expressiveness of ECAs, we kindly ask authors to prepare their submissions according to the following structure:

1. Brief description of application area character type(s) and research goals;
2. Description of their requirements for an individual agent;
3. Description of the actual aspects of individualism being used in their system(s);
4. Report on experiences and on evaluation studies with the creation of a particular agent - what are the useful features, what are the necessary steps toward such a creation;
5. Other aspects relevant to the topic of this workshop

Papers length should be 4 to 8 pages long (using 11pt, single space, all margins of 2cm) and should be accompanied as much as possible with an animation or URL's showing multimedia content (actual systems, screenshots, animations, etc) describing the work presented. Papers must be written in English and submitted in electronic format (see below).

Every paper submitted will be reviewed by at least 2 reviewers from the program committee. Reviewing will take place as soon as the paper is received so please get your papers in early.

Submissions should be emailed to Catherine Pelachaud (c.pelachaud@iut.univ-paris8.fr) in PS, PDF or Word format by 3^rd May
You will receive a return acknowledgement by email.

The first page of your submission should include:

If email is not possible, please send two copies of your paper to (though, email is much preferred):

Catherine Pelachaud IUT of Montreuil University of Paris 8 140 rue de la Nouvelle France 93100 Montreuil France

Note: Workshop participants will be required to register for the Second International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents & Multi-Agent Systems main conference (http://www.aamas-conference.org/)

A MS Word template is provided here. The file AAMAS2003_eca.doc is an example of how the submission should look as is AAMAS2003_eca.pdf.