First International Workshop on Emotion for Sociable Agents (ESA14)

In our aim to build soft- and hardware agents that are to appear intelligent and to interact seamlessly with humans we must not neglect the importance of emotions in social interaction. In human interaction, emotions can influence both motivation and conversational content. It is assumed that this is also true for human-agent interaction because social signals (like emotional expressions) produced by computational agents are processed in a similar manner as signals which are produced by humans. Therefore, artificial emotions are used in human-agent interaction (HAI) for several purposes. First of all, artificial emotions allow an embodied agent to react in a more believable and natural manner. Furthermore, simulated emotions can serve as a control mechanism and can be useful to provide feedback to the user about the agent’s internal states.

During the last years the agents community has seen a great increase in the number of robotic and virtual agents that express and perceive emotions and, thus, interact in a more human-like and intuitive manner. These socially interactive agents are used for different purposes, e.g. as toys, as educational tools, or as research platforms. Therefore, this half-day workshop will serve as a forum for presentations related to affective computing, virtual humans, and social robotics. Research on emotion encompasses a multitude of subtopics that are of interest to this workshop and we open up a platform to discuss different interdisciplinary perspectives on the role that emotions play in making artificial agents sociable.