We are excited to invite you to our workshop DEBP-PVA: Designing and Evaluating Behavioural Paradigms With Proactive Virtual Agents. This a workshop of IVA 2025 taking place in Berlin, Germany on September 16th. This year’s IVA will include workshop papers as part of their proceedings.

DEBP-PVA examines the design and evaluation of behavioural paradigms that effectively elicit and measure proactive behaviour in Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA) research. Current paradigms focus mainly on agent behaviour. However, it remains unclear how these paradigms effectively help to elicit and measure proactive agent interactions and produce ecologically valid data, particularly for the paradigms that promote the use of different modalities during interaction beyond text or speech.

Submission Guidelines

We invite researchers to contribute  2-4 pages long (including references) papers that include position statements, literature reviews, or in-progress empirical studies. We are especially interested in short position papers that make an argument for a viewpoint or perspective to advance the current research landscape of the design and evaluation of behavioural paradigms of IVAs in proactive scenarios. All accepted papers should be prepared in the “ACM Standard” format, more specifically the “SigConf” format (see instructions for the IVA full papers: https://iva.acm.org/2025/call-for-papers/).

Submission will be made in EasyChair using the link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=debppva25.

List of Topics

Suggested workshop topics may include, but are not limited to the following areas:

• Design and evaluation of experimental tasks (behavioural paradigms) that effectively elicit and measure proactive behaviour in IVAs
• Behavioural paradigms and methodologies are best suited to evaluate proactive interactions within realistic settings
• How can gaze, motion, speech, and other multimodal cues be leveraged to both trigger and evaluate proactive agent behaviour?
• Challenges when evaluating the fidelity of proactive behaviours within ecologically valid paradigms.
• Key differences between proactive behaviour as intended in paradigms versus how it manifests in real-world scenarios.

Publication

We are excited to announce that the accepted workshop papers will be published via ACM as IVA 25 Adjunct Proceedings. This offers participants an excellent opportunity to make their work accessible to a wider audience and underscores the importance of the workshops within IVA 2025. Please note that the camera-ready workshop papers will be processed via the IVA 25 EasyChair and should be prepared in the “ACM Standard” format, more specifically the “SigConf” format (see instructions for the IVA full papers: https://iva.acm.org/2025/call-for-papers/). 

Venue

The workshop will be held as part of IVA 2025 conference at September 16th, 2025. IVA 2025 will take place in Berlin at the beautiful campus site of HTW directly at the river Spree (Wilhelminenhofstraße 75A, 12459 Berlin).

Organizing Committee

 Alafate Abulimiti, Paola R. Peña, Guy Laban, Tanja Schneeberger, Jairo Pérez-Osorio, Tobias Thejll-Madsen, Nima Zargham, Smit Desai, Justin Edwards, Matthias Kraus, Shashank Ahire, Fatemeh Alizadeh, Yuan He, Alberto Jovane, Darragh L. Higgins, Jaisie Sin, Heloisa Candello, Rachel McDonnell, Benjamin R. Cowan

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to alafate.abulimiti@isir.upmc.fr and paola.pena@ucdconnect.ie