[Dutch-chapter] GALA event at IVA: Second Call for Participation 2011

[Phil Heslop]

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GALA (Gathering of Animated Lifelike Agents)
at IVA 2011, September 20-22, 2011, Reykjavík University, Iceland
http://di.ncl.ac.uk/publicweb/gala2011/
Call for Participation
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GALA IN A NUTSHELL:
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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.
- An optional short paper (2 pages).

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 student 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, unlike the output of larger-scale research presented at conferences.
GALA entries MUST be separate from other entries to IVA. The purpose of the event is to showcase student work or smaller projects and not to augment a paper submission to IVA.

PARTICIPANTS TRACKS:
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1. Undergraduate Student:
	Students from any university, individually or as a group, may submit in this track. (For each student submission a supervisor should be named). The works submitted in this track must be prepared within a year prior to submission. Student submissions will be considered separately from submissions from other track, so be sure to indicate a student submission (student submissions will not be competing with other entries for consideration or for the jury award). It is not necessary to attend the conference to be considered for submission, but attendance is definitely welcome.
2. Other (Including Graduate students and Post-Graduates):
	In this track work from academic institutions and industry, as well as from multi-party national or international projects, is welcome. Submissions to this track will be considered separately from the student track. “Other” entries will not be considered for the Jury award, but will still be considered for the audience award at the event.
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 topics  and formal requirements (see below) are identical for both tracks.

SUBMISSION TOPICS:
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1. Communication:
	To tie in with the IVA special topic, Language and Culture - How do Intelligent Virtual Agents communicate with users? How do they communicate with each other?  How can the user understand that communication is taking place between IVAs in an environment? The movie should show some aspect of IVA communication, and how the effect was created.
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.
	
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:
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The animated lifelike agent is to be described (with the possibility of inclusion in the IVA2011 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:
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26th April - GALA short paper deadline.
23rd May - GALA flash video submission deadline.

CONTACT: gala2011 at ncl.ac.uk
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