Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Hosting a scientific conference in Virtual or Mixed Reality becomes a reality. One key advantage of this format is thepossibility to use Virtual Actors controlled by Artificial Intelligence as conference participants, in such roles as a VirtualPoster Presenter, a Discussion Panel Moderator, a Lightning Session Chair, and a Virtual Party Servant. All these rolesrequire human-level socially emotional functionality and can be implemented using one approach, which is based on theemotional Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architecture (eBICA). At the core of the model is a semantic map of humanemotional states. Interaction modalities include facial expression, gaze and other body language, voice intonation, and thesentiment of verbal content of communications - using both recognition and expression technologies for each modality.Paradigms involve establishment and maintenance of believable socially emotional contact with a human participant. Theconference BICA*AI 2020 (https://bica2020.bicasociety.org) is used as a testbed. Support: Russian Science FoundationGrant #18-11-00336.