committee decided to accept 15 full papers and 48 extended abstracts, which led to 11 long presentations, 22 short presentations, and 20 poster presentations at the conference. The IVA conference started in 1998 as a workshop on "Intelligent Virtual Environments" at the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Brighton, UK, which was followed by a similar one in 1999 in Salford, Manchester, UK. After its initial success, dedicated stand-alone IVA conferences took place in Madrid, Spain (2001), Irsee, Germany (2003), and Kos, Greece (2005). Since 2006 IVA has become a full-fledged annual international event, which was first held in Marina del Rey, CA, USA, then Paris, France (2007), Tokyo, Japan (2008), Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2009), Philadelphia, PA, USA (2010), Reykjavik, Iceland (2011), Santa Cruz, CA, USA (2012), Edinburgh, UK (2013), Boston, MA, USA (2014), Delft, The Netherlands (2015), Los Angeles, CA, USA (2016), Stockholm, Sweden (2017), and Sydney, Australia (2018). The special topic of the 2019 conference was "Social Learning with Interactive Agents", focusing on the opportunities of interactive agents for modeling learning of users from socially intelligent agents, but also for having agents learn from and about their users. There are many possible applications of this topic, from learning to read social cues or sign language to learning to lead or negotiate. A broad array of individuals, across all age groups and occupations, could benefit from social learning with interactive virtual agents. |