Multimodal Interaction with Virtual Agents and Communication Robots

Dear Colleagues,

Multimodal information, including language, voice, gaze, posture, gestures, and biological signals, facilitates social interaction between humans. It reveals mechanisms of emotion, attitude, personality, skill, role, and other forms of human communication activities. On the other hand, virtual agents and communication robots are developed to save humans from simple and repetitive tasks for more valuable and more sophisticated ones. They imitate human-like outlooks and behaviors so that their users can interact with them using normal conversation without needing specific training. To reproduce such human behaviors and close the interaction loop, these artifacts have to perceive, understand, and generate them in a multimodal way.

In recent years, the advancement of machine learning techniques has enabled higher accuracy and brought out the potential of multimodal social signal processing. Much attention has been focused on such technologies and their applications for understanding and modeling the social aspects of human beings through their communication activities. Through these processes, there is the potential to develop new technologies for human–agent and human–robot interactions.

To further improve these studies, in addition computer science disciplines such as AI, NLP, signal processing, ML, and HCI, other disciplines such as linguistics, psychology, and sociology play important roles in providing the theoretical backgrounds of human communication. In other words, this is an exciting research area that has the potential to encourage collaborations between researchers in a wide variety of disciplines and to inspire new interdisciplinary ideas.

We welcome submissions from all research fields related to multimodal interactions with virtual agents and communication robots. For example, articles related to topics such as theoretical foundations, empirical verifications, analysis as well as component technologies, integrations, interface designs, and system developments are welcomed, as are submissions from behavioral science and other social sciences.

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Multimodal Technologies and Interaction is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• multimodal interaction
• virtual agents
• communication robots
• social robotics
• machine learning
• verbal and non-verbal