How it came about I do not know anymore, but it seems I am involved in three workshops at the Intelligent Virtual Agents Conference later this year.

• Techniques towards Companion Technologies
• CASA: Computers as Social Actors
• Multimodal Corpora: Beyond audio and video

At the ACII conference (Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction) I am involved in organising a workshop on (mediated) touch and affect: http://hmi.ewi.utwente.nl/MeTA.