AAAI 2008 Spring Symposium on
Emotion, Personality, and Social Behavior

Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA
March 26 - 28, 2008

Symposium Schedule

Recent years have witnessed increased interest in modeling emotion and personality in cognitive, agent and
robot architectures. Increasingly, the focus has been on exploring the role of affective factors in social behavior.
These include emotions, moods, personality traits, and attitudes. Researchers and practitioners in areas such as
social robotics, game development, affective HCI, and synthetic agents are increasingly recognizing the importance
of these affective factors in developing believable, realistic and robust agents, and effective human-machine interfaces.

This symposium seeks to bring together researchers in diverse relevant areas such as affective computing,
believable agents, game design, robotics, social computing, and the arts, to examine the roles of emotions,
moods, personality traits and attitudes in mediating social behavior among biological and artificial agents.
The symposium will provide a forum for interdisciplinary interactions addressing fundamental issues in
modeling affect and personality in social behavior.

To facilitate interaction, moderated panels, small working groups, and open discussion will be emphasized,
rather than the traditional paper sessions. We encourage submissions of proposals for discussion topics,
panels, small working groups, as well as project demos.

Planned Panels:

Engagement, Trust and Intimacy: Are these the essential elements for a ‘successful’ interaction between a human and a robot?

Artificial Agents for Psychotherapy


Relevant topics include:

• How do we understand the interactions between emotion, personality, and social behavior?

• What can they tell us about cognitive / cognitive-affective architecture?

• How can we make compelling artificial characters?

• How can we make systems that facilitate social interaction among humans or among humans & artificial characters?

• How can considerations of affective factors contribute to more effective human-computer interaction in general?

• How do intrapsychic cognition-emotion interactions manifest at the interpersonal level?

• Methods and techniques for more systematic approaches to design

• What are the best approaches to developing the necessary knowledge-bases?

• What are the best data sources for architecture development and validation?

• How can we validate models and architectures?

• What are the emerging standards in affective artificial characters, robots and systems?

Important Dates:

March 26 - 28, 2008:                    Symposium

Symposium Schedule

Additional information:

AAAI 2008 Spring Symposia
AAAI Spring Symposia
AAAI Registration form

Organizing Committee:

Ian Horswill, Northwestern University (ian@northwestern.edu)
Eva Hudlicka, Psychometrix Associates (hudlicka@ieee.org)
Christine Lisetti, Florida International University (lisetti@cs.fiu.edu)
Juan Velasquez, MIT (jvelas@csail.mit.edu)

Program Committee:

Antonio Camurri, University of Genoa, Italy
Fiorella de Rosis, University of Bari, Italy
Gerry Matthews, University of Cincinnati, US
Andrew Ortony, Northwestern University, US
Ana Paiva, IST-Technical University of Lisbon and INESC-ID, Portugal
Rui Prada, IST-Technical University of Lisbon and INESC-ID, Portugal
Helmut Prendinger, National Institute of Informatics, Japan