Workshop on Models of Culture for Intelligent Virtual Agents

Since humans use their own cultures as a frame of reference for producing and interpreting behavior and interaction, culture is an unavoidable part of human-human and human-intelligent virtual agent interaction. We would argue that there is no such thing as a virtual agent without a culture model, since culture is by its very definition the practices and behaviors that we take for granted, and therefore designers of agents most often incorporate their own cultural models. These unexamined design decisions may cause problems in the interaction in ways that lead us to reflect on how to design models of culture for human-agent interaction. In addition, an increasing number of the applications served by virtual agents require models of culture for intercultural interaction and/or for teaching intercultural interaction. The presentations and discussions in this workshop target the design decisions we make in designing, implementing, and deploying intelligent virtual agents that must operate in the real world where culture is an important part of interaction.

Papers are invited that target intelligent virtual agents that must function in specific cultural environments where culture affects task performance, how to manage cross-cultural human-agent interaction, applications that use virtual agents to teach cultural models to, e.g., soldiers or international students who must function in cultures different from their own, applications that use agents to teach cross-cultural interaction.  Topics may include models of culture that can be or have been used in virtual agents, computational architectures that can be or have been used in culturally-aware virtual agents, cross-cultural and inter-cultural data collection methods that have or can inform agent models, applications that have or can be deployed for culture-specific or cross-culturally aware intelligent virtual agents,  human-agent interactions, evaluation methods and metrics for human-agent models of culture.

Topics include:

• Goals for building models of culture for human-agent interaction (functioning in specific cultural environments that affect task performance, managing cross-cultural interaction, teaching cultural models to, e.g., soldiers or international students, teaching cross-cultural interaction)
• Culture-specific virtual agents and robots
• Agents for teaching cultures, or cross-cultural interaction
• Models of culture that could be or have been used in virtual agents
• Architectures that could be or have been used in culturally-aware virtual agents
• Cross-cultural and inter-cultural data collection methods that can inform agent models
• Culture-specific or cross-cultural human-agent interactions
• Evaluation methods and metrics for human-agent models of culture
• Simulations of cultural differences

This full-day workshop will be held on Tuesday, August 26th, at the conference venue.

Organizers:

Chairs:

• Justine Cassell (CMU)
• Birgit Endrass (U. Wurzburg, U. Augsburg)
• Samantha Finkelstein (CMU)
• Samuel Mascarenas (IST - Lisbon, Portugal)
• Elnaz Nouri (USC ICT)
• David Traum (USC ICT)

Workshop Website: http://gaips.inesc-id.pt/mociva/