AAMAS 09 Workshop on Empathic Agents

Creating characters and robots that give the illusion of life and allow for the user's suspension of disbelief is still a debated and fundamental goal in the area of virtual agents. However, when we read a book, or watch a film we not only suspend our disbelief and look at the characters as "life", but we also establish emotional relations with the characters. We feel sad when they are sad, angry when something unfair is done to our hero, and so on. That is, we put ourselves in the shoes of our favorite characters, and feel emotions for what is happening to them. And these emotional empathic relations are part of achieving that suspension of disbelief.

This workshop will be a meeting point to discuss the creation of agents that are both empathic towards their users and foster empathic reactions towards them by their users. This workshop will be the second on this topic;the first one was organized in 2004 in NewYork at the AAMAS conference.

This workshop will be part of the 8th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent systems (AAMAS),  to be held in Budapest Hungary on May 10-15, 2009. Details on the conference can be found here.