Preface of the IVA 2009 Proceedings

Welcome to the Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, held 14-16 September, 2009 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) are interactive characters that exhibit humanlike qualities and communicate with humans or with each other using natural human modalities such as speech and gesture. They are capable of real-time perception, cognition and action allowing them to participate in a dynamic physical and social environment. IVA 2009 is an interdisciplinary annual conference and the main forum for presenting research on modeling, developing and evaluating intelligent virtual agents with a focus on communicative abilities and social behavior. The development of IVAs requires expertise in multimodal interaction, and several AI fields like cognitive modeling, planning, vision and natural language processing. Computational models are typically based on experimental studies and theories in human-human and human-robot interaction, and conversely, IVA technology may provide interesting lessons for these fields. The realization of engaging IVAs is a challenging task in itself, so reusable modules and tools are of great value. The fields of application range from robot assistants, social simulation and tutoring to games and artistic exploration. The enormous challenges and diversity of possible applications of IVAs have resulted in an established annual conference. It was started in 1998 as a workshop at the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence on intelligent Virtual Environments in Brighton, UK, which was followed by a similar one in 1999 in Salford, Manchester. Then dedicated stand-alone IVA conferences took place in Madrid, Spain in 2001, Irsee, Germany in 2003, and Kos, Greece in 2005. Since 2006 IVA has become a full-fledged annual international event, which was first held in Marina del Rey, California, then in Paris, France, in 2007, and Lifelike Agents (GALA), a festival to showcase state-of-the-art IVAs created by university students, academic or industrial research groups. This year papers on selected GALA submissions are also included in the IVA proceedings. The current conference represents well the multitude of expertise from different scientific and artistic disciplines and the value of both theoretical and practical work needed to create IVAs which suspend our disbelief. The special application theme of IVA 2009 was games