Workshop 2023
Official ICMI 2023 Workshop – October 9 (in person)
The GENEA (Generation and Evaluation of Non-verbal Behaviour for Embodied Agents) Workshop
2023 aims at bringing together researchers that use different methods for non-verbal-behaviour generation
and evaluation, and hopes to stimulate the discussions on how to improve both the
generation methods and the evaluation of the results. We invite all interested researchers to submit a paper related to their
work in the area and to participate in the workshop. This is the fourth installment of the GENEA Workshop,
for more information about the 2022 installment, please go here.
Important dates
Call for papers
GENEA 2023 is the fourth GENEA Workshop and an official workshop of ACM ICMI ’23, which will take place in Paris, France. Accepted paper submissions will be included in the adjunct ACM ICMI proceedings.
Generating non-verbal behaviours, such as gesticulation, facial expressions and gaze, is of great importance for natural interaction with embodied agents such as virtual agents and social robots. At present, behaviour generation is typically powered by rule-based systems, data-driven approaches, and their hybrids. For evaluation, both objective and subjective methods exist, but their application and validity are frequently a point of contention.
This workshop asks, “What will be the behaviour-generation methods of the future? And how can we evaluate these methods using meaningful objective and subjective metrics?” The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers working on the generation and evaluation of non-verbal behaviours for embodied agents to discuss the future of this field. To kickstart these discussions, we invite all interested researchers to submit a paper for presentation at the workshop.
Paper topics include (but are not limited to) the following
- Automated synthesis of facial expressions, gestures, and gaze movements
- Audio- and music-driven nonverbal behaviour synthesis
- Closed-loop nonverbal behaviour generation (from perception to action)
- Nonverbal behaviour synthesis in two-party and group interactions
- Emotion-driven and stylistic nonverbal behaviour synthesis
- New datasets related to nonverbal behaviour
- Believable nonverbal behaviour synthesis using motion-capture and 4D scan data
- Multi-modal nonverbal behaviour synthesis
- Interactive/autonomous nonverbal behavior generation
- Subjective and objective evaluation methods for nonverbal behaviour synthesis
- Guidelines for nonverbal behaviours in human-agent interaction
We will accept long (8 pages) and short (4 pages) paper submissions, all in the same double-column ACM conference format as used by ICMI. Pages containing only references do not count toward the page limit for any of the paper types. Submissions should be formatted for double-blind review made in PDF format through OpenReview.
Submission site: https://openreview.net/group?id=ACM.org/ICMI/2023/Workshop/GENEA
To encourage authors to make their work reproducible and reward the effort that this requires, we have introduced the GENEA Reproducibility Award.
We will also host an open poster session for advertising your late-breaking results and already-published work to the community. No paper submission is needed to participate in the poster session, and these posters will not be part of any proceedings (non archival). Submission guidelines for the poster session will be available on the workshop website.
Reproducibility Award
Reproducibility is a cornerstone of the scientific method. Lack of reproducibility is a serious issue in contemporary research which we want to address at our workshop. To encourage authors to make their papers reproducible, and to reward the effort that reproducibility requires, we are introducing the GENEA Workshop Reproducibility Award. All short and long papers presented at the GENEA Workshop will be eligible for this award. Please note that it is the camera-ready version of the paper which will be evaluated for the reward.The award is awarded to the paper with the greatest degree of reproducibility. The assessment criteria include:
- ease of reproduction (ideal: just works, if there is code - it is well documented and we can run it)
- extent (ideal: all results can be verified)
- data accessibility (ideal: all data used is publicly available)
Invited speakers
Rachel McDonnell
Biography
Rachel McDonnell is an Associate Professor in Creative Technologies at the School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College Dublin. She is also a Fellow of Trinity College, a Principal Investigator in the ADAPT Research Centre, and a member of the Graphics, Vision, and Visualisation Group. She received her PhD in Computer Graphics in 2006 from TCD. Rachel McDonnell's research interests include computer graphics, character animation, virtual humans, VR, and perception. Her main focus is on real-time performance capture and perception of virtual humans.Sean Andrist
Biography
Sean Andrist is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington. His research interests involve designing, building, and evaluating socially interactive technologies that are physically situated in the open world, particularly embodied virtual agents and robots. He is currently working on the Platform for Situated Intelligence project, an open-source framework designed to accelerate research and development on a broad class of multimodal, integrative-AI applications. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he primarily researched effective social gaze behaviors in human-robot and human-agent interaction.Organising committee
The main contact address of the workshop is: genea-contact@googlegroups.com.
Workshop organisers
