Workshop on Culturally Motivated Virtual Characters (CMVC. 2011)
 

In present day world, there is an increased interaction between people belonging to different cultures. On one hand these encounters can be useful for bringing cultures closer, but also have the potential of causing unfortunate misunderstandings, which can escalate to all out conflicts.  Hofstede defines culture as “forms of things in mind and their mental models of perceiving and interpreting them”, Virtual characters can be used to enhance cultural understanding by making them culturally aware, In order to do this we can promote cultural influence to cognitive processes of perception, planning and the ability to react in a virtual world. In doing so the relationship between emotions and cultures is of significant importance. Theories related to emotional modulation, cultural differences and personality become the basis of modelling such virtual characters. This gives rise to number of issues to be looked at, e.g. how to model intelligent virtual characters so that they are culturally aware, making the interaction with these characters culturally motivated and to evaluate  what are the effects of using cultures in virtual characters.

Bringing leading researchers in the relevant areas of research will result in a broader discussion in importance and state of the art of this field and will be very useful in discussing technical and theoretical issues involved along with the challenges waiting for us in the future.

The workshop will focus, but is not limited to the following areas of research:

  1. Models of Cultures for Virtual Characters
  2. Culture based Narrative and Dialogue systems
  3. Culture Based  Interaction with Virtual Characters
  4. Evaluation Reports on user experience
  5. Case Studies on Emotions and Cultures
  6. Authoring Cultural Characters.

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The workshop aims at bringing together researchers in the field of Computer Sciences, Psychology, Cultural studies to discuss the state of the art in this field of research and explore the challenges in the future. The workshop will be a combination of paper presentations and extended discussion sessions. We encourage the submission of long (6-8 pages) and short papers (3-4 pages). The format of the submissions should be Springer (LNCS) accepted.  It is intended to compile a special issue journal for this workshop.

Dates:

Paper Submission: July 1st 2011.
Feedback and Notification: August 15th 2011
Print Ready Paper: August 31st 2011
Workshop dates: 14th September 2011.

 

Organising Committee

Asad Nazir (Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh)
Sandy Louchart (Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh)

Programme Committee