Workshop 2024
Official ICMI 2024 Workshop – November 4 or 8, 2024 (in person)
The GENEA (Generation and Evaluation of Non-verbal Behaviour for Embodied Agents) Workshop
2024 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 fifth installment of the GENEA Workshop,
for more information about the 2023 installment, please go here.
Important dates
Submission Deadlines: All deadlines are set at the end of the day, Anywhere on Earth (AoE)
Call for papers
GENEA 2024 is the fifth GENEA Workshop and an official workshop of ACM ICMI ’24, which will take place in San José, Costa Rica. 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
- LLMs and foundation models in the context of non-verbal behaviour synthesis
- Subjective and objective evaluation methods for nonverbal behaviour synthesis
- Guidelines for nonverbal behaviours in human-agent interaction
We will accept long (max 8 pages) and short (max 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/2024/Workshop/GENEA
To encourage authors to make their work reproducible and reward the effort that this requires, we have introduced the GENEA Workshop 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
Oya Celiktutan
Biography
Oya Celiktutan is a Senior Lecturer in Robotics (Associate Professor) at the Department of Engineering, King’s College London, UK, where she leads the Social AI and Robotics Laboratory. Her research interest lies in machine learning to develop socially aware systems capable of autonomously interacting with humans. This includes addressing challenges in multimodal perception, understanding and generating human behaviour, as well as advancing navigation, manipulation, and interaction within the context of human-centric robotics. Her work has been supported by EPSRC, The Royal Society, and the EU Horizon, as well as through industrial collaborations. She received the EPSRC New Investigator Award in 2021 and her team’s research has been recognized with several awards, including the Best Paper Award at IEEE Ro-Man 2022, NVIDIA CCS Best Student Paper Award Runner Up at IEEE FG 2021, First Place Award and Honourable Mention Award at ICCV UDIVA Challenge 2021.Talk
(Coming soon)Organising committee
The main contact address of the workshop is: genea-contact@googlegroups.com.
Workshop organisers
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