Call For Papers: HICSS 59 (2026)-Mini-track on Human-Like Conversational Agents: Chatbots, Digital Humans, and Virtual Influencers

[Yuan, Lingyao [ISBA]]

Call For Papers: HICSS 59 (2026)-Mini-track on Human-Like Conversational Agents: Chatbots, Digital Humans, and Virtual Influencers
For Internet of Work and Play
Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
HICSS-60: Jan 5th to 8th 2027| Hilton Waikoloa Village, Big Island, Hawaii


Call for Papers

This mini-track explores the transformative role of AI-powered conversational agents (e.g., chatbots and digital humans) in reshaping both professional and personal aspects of daily life. As AI-driven interactions become more prevalent in workplaces, social media, entertainment, and customer service, understanding their impact is crucial. This mini-track delves into key topics such as trust formation, emotional engagement, user adoption, and the ethical implications of integrating human-like AI agents into digital spaces. It also examines how these technologies influence human behavior, decision-making, and social interactions, ultimately redefining the way we communicate, collaborate, and engage within the digital environment in both work and life.
Recent studies underscore key advancements in virtual influencers, emotional interactions with AI avatars, and the implications of digital human realism on credibility and engagement. As AI-powered digital humans become increasingly prevalent in marketing, social media, customer service, and virtual environments, understanding their psychological and behavioral effects is critical. This mini-track aims to explore themes such as consumer trust in AI-driven personas, the persuasive power of digital humans, ethical dilemmas in AI-generated content, and the role of synthetic media in shaping social perceptions. Additionally, we seek to examine the intersection of AI, human identity, and digital embodiment, providing a platform for interdisciplinary discussions on the future of AI-driven social interactions.
We recognize that publishing at HICSS is prestigious, with limited presentation slots available. Therefore, we are committed to ensuring that our mini-track is both unique and valuable to the HICSS community, particularly as AI-driven conversational agents and digital humans become an increasingly prominent and maturing technology category. Our mini-track has a well-established history at HICSS, dating back to HICSS 55 in 2022. Over the past several years, we have cultivated a community of researchers and practitioners focused on AI-driven conversational agents. Based on valuable feedback from track chairs and recent submissions, we have refined the focus to better align with emerging research trends in virtual influencers, digital humans, and their impact on consumer behavior, trust, and ethical considerations last year. At HICSS 59, we received 8 submissions to our minitrack and accepted 4 for our proceedings. We would like to continue the success of our minitrack this year again.

We appreciate the committee's consideration and are eager to continue contributing to HICSS by fostering high-quality discussions and research in this rapidly evolving field. This mini-track covers a wide range of topics within the area of human-like conversational agents. Submissions may focus on theory, strategy, cases, practices, methods, or anything else compelling and of great interest to the industry and the HICSS community. However, it is key that each submission convey a sense of significant importance, richness, or impact for theory, behaviors, or/and practice. We plan to promote this minitrack through

  1.  Posting to the IS, HCI, and IT communities via email lists (such as AISWorld).
  2.  Reaching out to researchers in digital human and related areas individually.
  3.  Contacting industry researchers via social media groups (such as Linkedin) and via key blogs (such as fxguide.com).

Short description of the mini-track including topics
We would like to position this mini-track as a place for researchers and practitioners from diverse backgrounds to share their research and ideas. There are a variety of important issues and topics of importance, such as new technology and visual design advancements to human-like conversational agents, the behavioral, emotional, and even physical responses of the users while interacting with human-like conversational agents, the underlying cognitive processes underlying the interactions, the impact of human-like conversational agents on the firm level or industry level, and ethical issues and societal considerations of the application of human-like conversational agents. Research could be wide-ranging, such as rich descriptive statistics, theories, emergent and innovative topics, models and frameworks related to technologies and their impact on marketing, case studies, methods, qualitative research, etc. The topics include but are not limited to:

  *   Exploration of virtual influencers as emerging phenomena (i.e. credibility, virtues, Uncanny Valley)
  *   Use of digital humans in live-streaming, customer service, and chatbots for e-commerce.
  *   AI-powered detection of social behaviors (i.e. loneliness)
  *   The role of realism and machine learning performance in shaping trust
  *   Visualization technology to advance human-like conversational agents
  *   Design factors with creating human-like conversational agents
  *   Design of digital humans by combining human and computer cognitive power
  *   Analysis of machine learning, big data, data mining, and other underlying technologies and algorithms of digital humans
  *   Impact of digital humans on the individual level (decision-making, problem-solving, negotiation, and creativity/innovation)
  *   Psychological and emotional effects of interacting with realistic human-like conversational agents
  *   Biases in interacting with human-like conversational agents
  *   The use of human-like conversational agents beyond individuals and its consequences in organizations
  *   Case studies on industry adoption of human-like conversational agents
  *   Use and economic implications of human-like conversational agents
  *   Social impact and ethics related to human-like conversational agents and their use
  *   Philosophical questions surrounding the idea of 'using' human-like conversational agents


IMPORTANT DATES


  *   April 15: Paper submission begins
  *   June 15: Paper submissions deadline
  *   August 17: Notification of Acceptance/Rejection
  *   September 4: Deadline for authors whose papers are conditionally accepted to submit a revised manuscript
  *   September 22: Deadline for authors to submit final manuscript for publication
  *   October 1: Deadline for at least one author to register for the conference

Conference Website:  http://hicss.hawaii.edu/
Author Guidelines:  http://hicss.hawaii.edu/tracks-and-minitracks/authors/

Mini-track Co-Chairs

Lingyao (Ivy) Yuan
lyuan at iastate.edu<mailto:lyuan at iastate.edu>

Mike Seymour
mike.seymour at sydney.edu.au<mailto:mike.seymour at sydney.edu.au>

Petri Parvinen
petri.parvinen at helsinki.fi<mailto:petri.parvinen at helsinki.fi>




-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://isworld.org/pipermail/aisworld_isworld.org/attachments/20260422/8ef965ae/attachment.htm>