During a conversation, listeners do not assimilate passively all of the speaker's words; they actively participate in the interaction providing information about how they feel and what they think of the speaker's speech. The speaker relies on signals emitted by the listener to know if he is listening or not, understanding or not, agreeing or not, etc. This informs the speaker on the success or failure of the communication and helps him to decide how to carry on with the interaction. In this thesis, to refer to signals provided by listeners, we adopt the term backchannel proposed by Yngve. We define backchannels as acoustic and non-verbal signals provided during the speaker's turn to exchange information about the communicative functions: contact, perception, understanding, and attitude. Backchannels are emitted in a non-intrusive way: that is, without interrupting the speaker's speech. Two fundamental characteristics of backchannels are: (i) they can be emitted at different level of intentionality; (ii) they can be reactive (deriving from a first process of perception of the speaker's speech) or response (deriving from a more aware evaluation). A particular form of backchannel is the mimicry of the speaker's behavior. By mimicry, we mean the behavior displayed by an individual who does what another person does. This type of behavior has been proven to play quite an important role during conversations. Due to the importance of the listener's behavior, in this thesis we propose to implement a model that generates this type of behavior for an Embodied Conversational Agent while interacting with a user. We aim to improve the human-machine interaction.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, IVA 2013, held in Edinburgh, UK, in August 2013. There was a total of 94 submissions. The 18 full and 18 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. In addition, the volume lists the 34 posters which were on display during the conference. The papers are organized in topical sections named: cognitive models; applications; dialogue, language, speech; non-verbal behaviour; and social, cultural models and agents.

The International Gesture Workshops (GW) are interdisciplinary events for those researching gesture-based communication across the disciplines. The focus of these events is a shared interest in understanding gestures and sign language in their many facets, and using them for advancing human–machine interaction. Since 1996, International Gesture Workshops have been held roughly every second year, with fully reviewed proceedings published by Springer. The International Gesture Workshop GW 2009 was hosted by Bielefeld University’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF – Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung) during February 25–27, 2009. Like its predecessors, GW 2009 aimed to provide a platform for participants to share, discuss, and criticize recent and novel research with a multidisciplinary audience. More than 70 computer scientists, linguistics, psychologists, neuroscientists as well as dance and music scientists from 16 countries met to present and exchange their newest results under the umbrella theme “Gesture in Embodied Communication and Human–Computer Interaction. ” Consistent with the steady growth of research activity in this area, a large number of high-quality submissions were received, which made GW 2009 an exciting and important event for anyone interested in gesture-related technological research relevant to human–computer interaction. In line with the practice of previous gesture workshops, presenters were invited to submit theirs papers for publication in a subsequent peer-reviewed publication of high quality. The present book is the outcome of this effort. Representing the research work from eight countries, it contains a selection of 28 thoroughly reviewed articles.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, IVA 2011, held in Reykjavik, Island, in September 2011. The 18 revised full papers and 27 revised short papers presented together with 25 poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 91 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on social and dramatic interaction; guides and relational agents; nonverbal behavior; adaptation and coordination; listening and feedback; frameworks and tools; cooperation and copresence; emotion; poster abstracts.

As a Patient - Would you like a "Patient Listener"? Are you tired of Medicine/Treatment "Trial and Error", at your expense? Are you tired of being shuffled from one Doctor to another? Do you want to "get better" and "stay better"? As a Doctor – Would you like more good information from Patients, relevant to their symptoms? Would you like to help Patients "get better" and "stay better"? Are you open to venturing out of your "comfort zone" in diagnosing and treating patients? Do you sometimes wonder if there is more to diagnosing/treating than what you were taught in Medical School? As a Health/Medical Innovator, Inventor, Engineer, Writer, other Creative Person – Are you looking for some new ideas? Would you like to "Interface" with the "Dr. Within" each of us? As an Insurance Company - Would you like to "pay out" less? If you answered yes to any of the above, maybe this book is for you. This book describes the Concepts of a "Patient Listener" and a "Super Symptom Checker" – Human, Computer, and/or Computer-Assisted Human – Considering the "Big Picture" around Health and/or Symptoms. This book is about 250 pages, a little over half written text. The remainder contains many Reference Links, from which you can build upon and learn from. The author of this book has set up Discussion Groups for this book to help others share, network, collaborate, etc. *** Use of the Information in this book may help the Patient, Doctor, and/or Others "Get Better". Some common Side Effects may include: A better understanding of what affects Health and Symptoms, Seeing the big picture surrounding Symptoms, Better health, less dependence on medication/treatment, generally "feeling better", Experiencing less perceived stress, more contentment with self and life, Perceiving more control of your life, in general, realizing there are always options no matter what, New insights on what could be done to make "it" better. Note - Continued Use of the Information in this book may result in "Staying Better". Ask your Doctor if "Getting Better" and "Staying Better" are right for you. :-)

Embodied conversational agents (ECA) and speech-based human–machine interfaces can together represent more advanced and more natural human–machine interaction. Fusion of both topics is a challenging agenda in research and production spheres. The important goal of human–machine interfaces is to provide content or functionality in the form of a dialog resembling face-to-face conversations. All natural interfaces strive to exploit and use different communication strategies that provide additional meaning to the content, whether they are human–machine interfaces for controlling an application or different ECA-based human–machine interfaces directly simulating face-to-face conversation. Coverbal Synchrony in Human-Machine Interaction presents state-of-the-art concepts of advanced environment-independent multimodal human–machine interfaces that can be used in different contexts, ranging from simple multimodal web-browsers (for example, multimodal content reader) to more complex multimodal human–machine interfaces for ambient intelligent environments (such as supportive environments for elderly and agent-guided household environments). They can also be used in different computing environments—from pervasive computing to desktop environments. Within these concepts, the contributors discuss several communication strategies, used to provide different aspects of human–machine interaction.

The Handbook on Socially Interactive Agents provides a comprehensive overview of the research fields of Embodied Conversational Agents, Intelligent Virtual Agents, and Social Robotics. Socially Interactive Agents (SIAs), whether virtually or physically embodied, are autonomous agents that are able to perceive an environment including people or other agents, reason, decide how to interact, and express attitudes such as emotions, engagement, or empathy. They are capable of interacting with people and one another in a socially intelligent manner using multimodal communicative behaviors, with the goal to support humans in various domains. Written by international experts in their respective fields, the book summarizes research in the many important research communities pertinent for SIAs, while discussing current challenges and future directions. The handbook provides easy access to modeling and studying SIAs for researchers and students, and aims at further bridging the gap between the research communities involved. In two volumes, the book clearly structures the vast body of research. The first volume starts by introducing what is involved in SIAs research, in particular research methodologies and ethical implications of developing SIAs. It further examines research on appearance and behavior, focusing on multimodality. Finally, social cognition for SIAs is investigated using different theoretical models and phenomena such as theory of mind or pro-sociality. The second volume starts with perspectives on interaction, examined from different angles such as interaction in social space, group interaction, or long-term interaction. It also includes an extensive overview summarizing research and systems of human–agent platforms and of some of the major application areas of SIAs such as education, aging support, autism, and games.

The two-volume set LNCS 6974 and LNCS 6975 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction, ACII 2011, held in Memphis,TN, USA, in October 2011. The 135 papers in this two volume set presented together with 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 196 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on recognition and synthesis of human affect, affect-sensitive applications, methodological issues in affective computing, affective and social robotics, affective and behavioral interfaces, relevant insights from psychology, affective databases, Evaluation and annotation tools.

Recent years have seen the rise of a remarkable partnership between the social and computational sciences on the phenomena of emotions. This book reports on the state-of-the-art in both social science theory and computational methods, and illustrates how these two fields, together, can both facilitate practical computer/robotic applications and illuminate human social processes.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Intelligent Virtual Agents, IVA 2007, held in Paris, France, September 2007. The 19 revised full papers and 12 revised short papers presented together with five invited talks and the abstracts of 32 poster papers are organized in topical sections on rendering and analysis, culture and identity, behavior models, feedback models, dialogues, applications, evaluation, gaze models and emotions.