In conjunction with  AmI'18 , European Conference on Ambient Intelligence, 12-14 November 2018 – Larnaca, Cyprus

Avatars, also known as Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs), have been successfully employed in several domains, including gaming, education, health, training, Active and Assisted Living (AAL) etc. ECAs provide an intuitive and natural way for users to interact with Intelligent systems that offer services of different kinds.

Since emotions play a fundamental role in human communication, the affective capabilities an agent employs have a strong impact on the perception of its intelligence, quality of interaction, and more importantly, on user engagement. Affective interaction involves several aspects like the recognition of the user’s affective state, based for example on speech and video processing, the computational modelling of the agent’s affective state and behaviour, selection of appropriate responses that are designed to influence the user affective, synthesis and expression of affect via animated facial and/or bodily expressions, dialogue management which gracefully handles errors and interruptions, etc.

Successfully addressing open challenges in these domains can increase the frequency and quality of interaction, leading to a better acceptance of the agents and, in general, the provided solutions. Principles of affective interaction may be similarly applied to robot-based systems to gain similar benefits and create more effective human-computer interaction.

This workshop is designed to bring together researchers from a wide range of different disciplines to continue the discussion on affective interaction with avatar and robot systems, started during the previous edition which was held at AmI’2017.