| Sumario: | Welcome to the proceedings of the 19th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (ACM IVA 2019). IVA is the annual interdisciplinary conference in which leading scientists from around the world present and discuss their latest work on socially intelligent agents. These agents are intelligent virtual characters or robots which humans can interact with. They often have anthropomorphic elements to evoke responses that humans would exhibit when interacting with other humans. For this, agents use natural human communication modalities such as speech, gesture, and facial expressions. Besides these interaction modalities, the agents are capable of real-time perception, artificial cognition, and actions in the social environment they operate in. Constructing and studying these IVAs requires knowledge, theories, methods, and tools from a wide range of fields such as computer science, psychology, cognitive sciences, communication, linguistics, interactive media, human-computer interaction, and artificial intelligence. All these disciplines are represented in these proceedings. This volume contains the papers presented at the ACM IVA 2019 conference held on July 2-5, 2019 in Paris, France. There were 79 submissions (63 full papers and 16 extended abstracts). Each submission was reviewed by three program committee members and one senior program committee member. The 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.
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