[Dutch-chapter] GALA event at IVA: Call for Participation 2010 - Paper Deadline Extended 24th May 2010

[Phil Heslop]

Extension of Deadlines: 24th May 2010 - GALA short paper.

GALA (Gathering of Animated Lifelike Agents) at IVA 2010, September 20-22, 2010, Philadelphia http://iva2010.org/gala Call for Participation

--

GALA IN A NUTSHELL:
-------------------

GALA is an annual festival to showcase the latest Animated Lifelike Agents created by university students 

and academic or industrial research groups. GALA was launched in 2005. GALA provides:
-	The GALA Final event, to demonstrate the state-of-the-art in the technology of virtual humans.
-	The GALA Jury Award for student projects and the GALA Public Award for any entry.
-	The permanent GALA Gallery on the web with the best entries exhibited for further study.
-	The possibility of an optional short paper (2 pages) publication in the proceedings of the annual 

IVA conference, published by Springer.


An international jury will select entries for the GALA Gallery, to be presented live at the GALA Final. An 

award will be presented to the best entry.
GALA is the major event for demonstrating your interactive virtual humans, exploiting techniques in real-

time graphics, animation, multi-modal interaction, agents, emotion modelling, dialog management and 

related areas. The quality and interactive capabilities of the animated lifelike agent are to be presented 

in a short movie (see Submission details). GALA is different from and complementary to scientific 

conferences where demonstrations are at most illustrations of talks, often not included in proceedings and 

thus hard to reproduce. GALA specifically encourages university students at all levels to submit their 

work prepared in a shorter time, preferably as a project related to their university curriculum, unlike 

the output of larger-scale research presented at conferences.

PARTICIPANTS TRACKS:
--------------------

1. Student
Students from any university, individually or as a group, may submit in this track. For each student 

submission a supervisor should be named, who can be contacted should the jury want to clarify some issues 

concerning originality of the work or status of the authors. The works submitted in this track must be 

prepared within a year prior to submission, preferably as a student project related to a university 

curriculum. However, animated lifelike agents created in the context of a larger research project or 

industrial application are welcome too, as well as ones made on their developer's own initiative, i.e. 

without any background context. In the first case, the contribution of the student to the project as well 

as the earlier results built upon should be specifically emphasized.
  
2. Other
In this track work from academic institutions and industry, as well as from multi-party national or 

international projects, is welcome.

All submissions are candidates for the short list of entries, to be presented at the final show and to be 

included in the repository. Submission categories and formal requirements (see below) are identical for 

both tracks.
 
SUBMISSION CATEGORIES:
----------------------

1. Novel Interaction
The animated lifelike agent should interact with the user, but in a way that does not use a keyboard or 

mouse.  A simple example is to use a video camera or a microphone, but more novel interactions may came 

from using other input methods, such as wii motes, mobile phone or Microsoft’s new project Natal.   In any 

case the novelty of the interaction is key. 

2. Animated Lifelike Agent Application
The animated lifelike agent is developed for an application. The movie shows the animated lifelike agent 

in the application context. The points of interest are novelty of application, smoothness of interaction, 

appeal, general design, consistency, etc.

3. Animated Lifelike Agent Creation
In this category, a special feature (e.g. lip-sync, body design, facial animation, hand gesturing) of the 

animated lifelike agent is to be presented. The points of interest are modules or tools used to create 

certain aspects of animated lifelike agents, in an easy way and convincing quality.

In the last two categories, the embodiment (head/full body, realistic/cartoon-like), the cast of role 

(e.g.  information provider for the user, actor in interactive drama, educator, chatbot) and the media 

(e.g. Virtual reality, PC, palmtop, mobile phone) are open. Novel application domains, designs and media 

are encouraged. The only restriction is that the animated lifelike agent must have reactive and/or 

interactive capabilities, as opposed to virtual characters animated for a single purpose (e.g. CG 

animation for a film, direct usage of Motion Capture). Physical robots are not eligible for GALA.

SUBMISSION FORMAT:
------------------
The animated lifelike agent is to be described (with the possibility of inclusion in the IVA2010 

proceedings), followed by a (.flv) movie (to be shown at the GALA Final) of 2-4 minutes, in the first 

round.  The international jury will invite the entries for the second round, to be demonstrated at the 

GALA Final in public, as well as a high quality version of the video for the GALA presentation.

The submission deadlines are:
24th May 2010 - GALA short paper deadline.
1st  June 2010 - GALA flash video submission deadline.

CONTACT:
--------
Submissions should be sent to: gala2010 at ncl.ac.uk Event Chairs: Laura Pfeifer ( laurap at ccs.neu.edu), Phil Heslop (Philip.heslop at ncl.ac.uk)