Intelligent Conversational Agents

Chatbot technologies, embodied and conversational virtual agents are becoming more and more popular. Many people are owning an Alexa, Cortana or Echo or are talking to their virtual assistant on their phone. Indeed, such technologies have the potential of making our lives easier and relieve people from the more repetitive tasks. For example, it is imaginable that such systems are being used for financial applications by helping customers with frequently asked questions but also to advise them on in the long term more impactful decisions such as their pension plans. Further applications can be imagined in the area of healthcare and education, some of which are already in existence today.
Yet, deploying such technologies in real-world settings poses many challenges. For humans to be motivated to engage in longer term and/or repeated interaction with a conversational agent they need to see a clear benefit. The provision of information but also the interaction itself play an important role. How to create a conversational memory and how to handle sensing in-the-wild still pose great challenges.
The Article Collection will focus on these different challenges and will highlight potential ways to overcome them. Potential topics will include:

• Socially-Aware agents
• Educational conversational agents
• Multi-modal behaviour generation and perception
• Embodiment of conversational agents
• Ethics and Data Privacy

We welcome contributions that focuses not only different application areas for conversational agents but problems in their design, AI techniques deployed and methods for evaluation.

All submissions will undergo anonymous review to guarantee high scientific quality and relevance to the subject.