Call for Demos

Call for Demos

IMPORTANT DATES

  • Demo Proposal Submissions: June 22, 2026
  • Review Notification: July 10, 2026
  • Camera-ready Version: July 20, 2026
  • Conference: Sept 7–11, 2026

All deadlines are anywhere on earth (23:59 UTC−12).

About the ACM IVA Demo Track

The ACM IVA demo track should showcase interactive, working systems, ranging from well-instrumented research prototypes to mature academic or industry systems, that foreground embodied, conversational, or socially intelligent behavior rather than static visualizations or videos. We welcome both research- and industry-led demos, with a clear preference for systems that can be experienced live and that expose meaningful design or technical choices relevant to intelligent virtual agents.

The track prioritizes interaction quality and experiential value, alongside technical novelty and robustness; demos should illustrate not just what works, but how users engage with the agent in real time. Applied impact is valued where it advances understanding of deployment contexts (e.g., health, training, education), while novelty in interaction paradigms or agent capabilities remains central.

The target audience includes IVA researchers, practitioners, and students, with an emphasis on demos that spark cross-disciplinary dialogue, inspire replication or extension, and serve as concrete touchpoints for emerging directions in intelligent virtual agent research.

Scope and List of Topics

IVA invites submissions on a broad range of topics, including but not limited to:

  • Agent design and modeling of:
    • Cognition
    • Emotion (including personality and cultural differences)
    • Socially communicative behavior (e.g., of emotions, personality traits)
    • Conversational behavior
    • Social perception
    • Machine learning approaches to agent modeling
    • Approaches to realizing adaptive behavior
    • Models informed by theoretical and empirical research in psychology
  • Multimodal interaction:
    • Verbal and nonverbal behavior coordination
    • Face-to-face communication skills
    • Engagement
    • Managing co-presence and interpersonal relation
    • Multi-party interaction
    • Data-driven multimodal modeling
  • Social agent architectures:
    • Design criteria and design methodologies
    • Engineering of real-time human-agent interaction
    • Standards / measures to support interoperability
    • Portability and reuse
    • Specialized tools, toolkits and toolchains
  • Evaluation methods and studies:
    • Evaluation methodologies and user studies
    • Ethical considerations and societal impact
    • Applicable lessons across fields (e.g. between robotics and virtual agents)
    • Social agents as a means to study and model human behavior
  • Applications:
    • Applications in education, training, health, counseling, games, art, etc.
    • Virtual agents in games and simulations
    • Social agents as tools in psychology
    • Migration of agents between platforms
Instructions for Authors

All demo submissions must be submitted via EasyChair:
https://easychair.org/conferences?conf=iva2026

Submission Package (Required)

A demo submission must include all of the following components:

  • Main demo paper (maximum 2 pages, including images)
  • References (maximum 1 additional page)
  • Technical and logistical requirements (maximum 1 additional page)
  • Demo video (3–5 minutes, provided via hyperlink in main demo paper)

Submissions that do not include all required components will be desk-rejected.

1. Main Demo Paper (2 pages)

  • Rationale: Explain why the demonstrated system is of interest to the IVA research community.
  • System explanation: Describe the system, its intended use cases, and how it helps bridge a specific knowledge gap.
  • Video link: Include a hyperlink to the required demo video.

2. References (1 page)

All references must be included on a separate page following the main demo paper.

3. Technical and Logistical Requirements (1 page)

A separate page is required describing everything necessary to run and present the demo at the conference venue, including:

  • Required equipment (e.g., monitors, headsets, tables)
  • Space or setup constraints
  • A clear indication of which equipment will be provided by the authors

Images or sketches may be included if helpful.

4. Demo Video (Required)

A demo video must be provided via hyperlink and must be between 3 and 5 minutes long as part of the main demo paper. The video should show the system in operation and demonstrate what conference attendees will experience during the live demo interaction.

Formatting and Anonymity

Submissions must not be anonymized.

All written materials must follow the ACM Standard (“SigConf”) format.

Templates

ACM Policies and ORCID (Required)

By submitting a demo, authors acknowledge that they are subject to all ACM Publications Policies, including the Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects. Violations may result in investigation, retraction, or other penalties.

All authors must obtain an ORCID ID to complete the publishing process for accepted submissions. ACM uses ORCID IDs to support author discoverability, proper attribution, and name normalization.

Ethical Considerations: Demo submissions should reflect responsible and ethical design practices. Authors are expected to consider the broader social and ethical implications of their systems and use cases, particularly for human-like or socially interactive technologies. Demos that raise ethical concerns related to representation, power dynamics, or inappropriate use contexts may be subject to additional review.

Review Criteria and Process

Demos will be reviewed confidentially by both ACM IVA 2026 demo chairs. All submissions will be evaluated based on:

  • Scientific and/or practical contribution
  • Originality and innovation in interactive agent design
  • Quality of interactivity and human–agent interaction
  • Relevance to Social Cognition for Human–AI Cooperation
  • Clarity of the technical description and interactive concept

The possible outcomes of this review process are:

  • Desk rejection due to violations of the ACM IVA submission policies
  • Rejection
  • Acceptance

Large-scale language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT can only be used by the authors to edit the grammar or style of their own text. More information about ACM publication policies can be found here: https://www.acm.org/publications/policies

All submissions must be original work not previously presented at any workshop, symposium, or conference and not published in any archived conference proceeding, magazine, or journal.

Plagiarism in any form is unacceptable and will lead to the removal of the submission from the review process. Please also see the ACM guidelines here: https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/plagiarism-overview

Accepted demos will be published in the IVA adjunct proceedings, given the publication fee is paid by the authors or they qualify for a waiver. More information on this will be published on the IVA registration page soon.

Contacts

For more information, please contact the Demo Chairs:

Andrea Bönsch, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
Sharon Mozgai, USC Institute for Creative Technologies, USA

via the following email address: demochairs@iva.acm.org