This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Intelligent Virtual Agents, IVA 2006, held in Marina Del Rey, CA, USA, in August 2006.

The 24 revised full papers and 11 revised short papers presented together with 3 invited talks and the abstracts of 19 poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 73 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on social impact of IVAs, IVAs recognizing human behavior, human interpretation of IVA behavior, embodied conversational agents, characteristics of nonverbal behavior, behavior representation languages, generation of nonverbal behavior with speech, IVAs in serious games, cognition and emotion, and applications of IVAs.

The origin of the Intelligent Virtual Agents conference dates from a successful workshop on Intelligent Virtual Environments held in Brighton at the 13th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI'98). This workshop was followed by a second one held in Salford in Manchester in 1999. Subsequent events took place in Madrid, Spain in 2001 and Irsee, Germany in 2003 and attracted participants from both sides of the Atlantic as well as Asia. th This volume contains the proceedings of the 5 International Working Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, IVA 2005, held on Kos Island, Greece, September 12-14, 2005, which highlighted once again the importance and vigor of the research field. A half-day workshop under the title "Socially Competent IVA's: We are not alone in this (virtual) world!" also took place as part of this event. IVA 2005 received 69 submissions from Europe, North and South America, Africa and Asia. The papers published here are the 26 full papers and 14 short papers presented at the conference, as well as one-page descriptions of the 15 posters and the descriptions of the featured invited talks by Prof. Justine Cassell, of Northwestern University and Prof. Kerstin Dautenhahn, of the University of Hertfordshire. We would like to thank a number of people that have contributed to the success of this conference. First of all, we thank the authors for their high-quality work and their willingness to share their ideas.

This volume, containing the proceedings of IVA 2003, held at Kloster Irsee, in Germany, September 15-17, 2003, is testimony to the growing importance of IntelligentVirtualAgents(IVAs) asaresearch?eld.Wereceived67submissions, nearly twice as many as for IVA 2001, not only from European countries, but from China, Japan, and Korea, and both North and South America. As IVA research develops, a growing number of application areas and pl- forms are also being researched. Interface agents are used as part of larger - plications, often on the Web. Education applications draw on virtual actors and virtual drama, while the advent of 3D mobile computing and the convergence of telephones and PDAs produce geographically-aware guides and mobile - tertainment applications. A theme that will be apparent in a number of the papers in this volume is the impact of embodiment on IVA research - a char- teristic di?erentiating it to some extent from the larger ?eld of software agents.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Intelligent Virtual Agents, IVA 2001, held in Madrid, Spain in September 2001.The 16 revised full papers and five short papers presented together with two invited surveys were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. Among the topics addressed are intelligent agents in education, virtual human societies, virtual agents, animation systems, autonomous avatars, the virtual self, agent societies, Internet agents, mobile agents, collaborative virtual environments, virtual storytelling, interactive improvisational plays, agent-oriented simulation, and 3D agents.