The HCSNet Workshop on Interacting with Intelligent Virtual Characters (IIVC)

Intelligent Virtual Characters are becoming increasingly more sophisticated, and are being used in games, film, education, and social situations. We are seeing advances in perceptual abilities, language processing and generation, and animation; and a better understanding of embodied communication and conversation. Microsoft's new Xbox demo involving the virtual boy Milo sets a vision for the possibilities of virtual characters playing a role in social engagement with humans.

This workshop, held as part of HCSNet SummerFest 2009, aims to explore technical, psychological, and sociological issues in the development of intelligent virtual characters and applications involving them. We encourage a broad range of submissions from researchers working on the development of virtual characters or capabilities for them, or on issues related to human engagement with such characters, or on social situations that may involve one or more virtual participants. We are particularly interested in bringing together insights from both technical and social perspectives.

The HCSNet Workshop on Building the Australian National Corpus: Data Sources and Tools (AusNC)

Following on from the successful Designing the Australian National Corpus workshop held during SummerFest 2008, HCSNet (the ARC Research Network in Human Communication) is organising a workshop on Building the Australian National Corpus to be held as part of SummerFest 2009.

This workshop focuses on current developments and emerging possibilities in language data gathering and tools that might complement existing collections of language data in building the Australian National Corpus.

The Second International Conference on Music Communication Science (ICoMCS2)

ICoMCS2 is an interdisciplinary meeting about music communication. Topic areas include music performance, perception, and cognition, intermodal processes, information retrieval, audio-visual search and retrieval, music, language, and speech, generative systems, music and medicine, music education, ethnomusicology, music therapy, sonification, spatialization, musical interfaces, digital media, interactive arts, psychophysics, and psychoacoustics.

The Australasian Language Technology Workshop 2009 (ALTA09)

This year, the Seventh Australasian Language Technology Workshop (ALTA) will be held as part of HCSNet Summerfest. The main goals of ALTA workshop are to bring together the growing Language Technology (LT) community in Australia and New Zealand, to promote interactions and collaboration within this community and with the wider international LT community, and to encourage dissemination of research results.

The Australasian Document Computing Symposium (ADCS09)

ADCS 2009 is an opportunity for researchers and practitioners in document management and information retrieval to meet and present their work. The symposium aims to cover all aspects of Document Computing, ranging from the fundamentals of document architectures and standards for markup, through storage, management, retrieval, authentication and workflow, to active and virtual documents.

The Australian Language and Speech Conference (ALAS09)

The Australian Language and Speech Conference brings together researchers and practitioners from all areas interested in human language and speech. Past conferences have drawn participants from psychology, linguistics, speech pathology and associated disciplines. Papers focusing on any area of language processing, language or speech disorders or linguistics will be considered.

OZCHI 2009

The 21st Annual Conference of the Australian Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group (CHISIG) of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society of Australia (HFESA), 23rd-27th November 2009, The University of Melbourne, Victoria

AI'09

The 22nd Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1st-4th December 2009, The University of Melbourne, Victoria

INEX 09

Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval, 6th-10th December 2009, Brisbane, Queensland