Authors

Welcome to the HRI2009 conference that will take place on March 11-13, 2009 in San Diego, CA. The overall theme of the conference is “Interacting Naturally With Robots.”

Today’s robots require increasingly complex human-robot interaction (HRI) capabilities to meet the demands of the environments and contexts in which they operate. In particular, natural human-like communications capabilities are becoming critical for robots operating in everyday settings such as home, office, shopping, and museum environments. Inter- and multidisciplinary research in HRI is essential for enabling robots to transcend the role of mere tools and begin to collaborate with humans to accomplish complex tasks. The Fourth Annual Conference on Human-Robot Interaction is dedicated to the advancement of natural human-robot interaction, which highlights the importance of the technical and social issues underlying future long-term human-robot interaction, in the context of companion and assistive robots for long-term use in everyday life and work activities. HRI is a single-track, highly selective annual international conference that seeks to showcase the very best interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research in human-robot interaction with roots in social psychology, cognitive science, HCI, human factors, artificial intelligence, robotics, organizational behavior, anthropology and many more, and we invite broad participation.

Full and Short Paper Submission

Authors are invited to submit all manuscripts in PDF (Adobe Acrobat) format. Eight camera-ready pages including figures are allowed for each full paper. Accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings, archived in the ACM Digital Library, and assigned for either oral or full poster presentation.

Our website will be open for Late-Breaking Abstracts (2 pages) until January 5th, 2009.  Although abstracts will be screened for relevance to the HRI conference area, our goal is to have a very high acceptance rate, so the review process will be lenient.  Accepted abstracts will be presented at a poster session during HRI 2009.  Late-Breaking Abstracts will be available after the conference in the ACM digital library. These library entries would be non-archival, thus enabling you to take this work and re-submit it to other venues, while still allowing this early version to remain visible to researchers worldwide.

Authors will be notified of the acceptance decision by January 8th, 2009.  IMPORTANT: If accepted, authors must be prepared to submit both the source file and a PDF version of the paper to Sheridan Printing (https://www.sheridanprinting.com/typedept/hri2.htm) by January 13th, 2009 or risk not having their paper included in the proceedings.

You can find the formatting and submission instructions below. In addition, you may want to consider the evaluation criteria and the categories & keywords.

Video Submission

We invite videos related to all aspects of HRI. Besides the importance of the lessons learned and the novelty of the situation, the entertainment value will be judged. The video itself must be self-explanatory for the audience. The videos will be published in the conference proceedings and archived in the ACM Digital Library. The official CFP is now available.

Tutorials and Workshops

Proposals are sought from those wishing to organize a Tutorial or a Workshop on a HRI-related theme. Tutorials and Workshops will be held on March 10, one day before the main technical sessions. More information is available at the Call for Tutorials and Workshops. The available workshops include:

HRI Pioneers Workshop

Organizers: Alan Wagner, Rosemarijn Looije, Maxim Makatchev, Marek Michalowski, Emily Mower
March 10th, 2009 (full day)

The field of human-robot interaction is new but growing rapidly. While there are now several established researchers in the field, many of the current human-robotic interaction practitioners are students or recently graduated. This workshop, to be held in conjunction with the HRI 2009 conference, aims to bring together this group of researchers to discuss their work, talk about the important upcoming issues in the field, and hear about what their colleagues are doing. Those who have not attended a previous session are highly encouraged to submit to this workshop, although previous attendees will be considered for acceptance as well.

Deadline for submissions: 15 October 2008
More information: https://hripioneers.org/hri09/

Social responsibility in HRI: Conducting our research, changing the world

Organizers: Nathan G. Freier, Vanessa Evers, Takayuki Kanda, Victoria Groom, Bigle Mutlu, Peter H. Kahn
March 10, 2009 (morning)

At the 2008 ACM/IEEE Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2008) a provocative panel was held to discuss the complicated ethical issues that abound in the field of human-robot interaction.  The panel members and the audience participation made it clear that the HRI community desires – indeed, is in need of – an ongoing discussion on the nature of social responsibility in the field of human-robot interaction.  At this half-day workshop, we will explore through presentation and discussion the issues of social responsibility in HRI, focusing on the unique features of HRI (e.g., value-specific domains such as autonomy, accountability, trust, and/or human dignity; and application areas such as military applications, domestic care, entertainment, and/or communication).

Deadline for submissions: January 15, 2009
More information: https://www.rpi.edu/~freien/hri2009workshop/

Societal impact: How socially accepted robots can be integrated in our society

Organizers: Astrid Weiss, Manfred Tscheligi, Aude Billard
March 10, 2009 (afternoon)

This half-day workshop will discuss possible methodological approaches to evaluate social acceptance and societal impact of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) with a special focus on collaboration with robots. The main challenge of the workshop is to develop instruments for measuring social acceptance and societal impact in the field of HRI.

The workshop will be held in conjunction with the Workshop “Social Responsibility in HRI: Conducting our Research, Changing the World” which will be held in the morning of March 10. Linking point between these two HRI2009 workshops is how ethical issues can be integrated into the development process of HRI scenarios, by integrating social acceptance and societal impact measurements.

Workshop candidates are requested to send a position paper (no longer than 4 A4 pages) before 15.01.2009 about a research or study they have been involved with (related to the topics described above) to astrid.weiss@sbg.ac.at. All position papers must be submitted in PDF format and conform to conference proceedings specifications!

Deadline for submissions: January 15th 2009
More information: https://workshops.icts.sbg.ac.at/hri2009societal/

Full-day tutorial: Using and adapting Human-Computer Interaction methods for HRI

Organizers: Jill Drury, Holly Yanco
March 10, 2009 (full day)

Participants will learn about human-computer interaction (HCI) evaluation methods that have been used and adapted for HRI.  This tutorial will cover examples from all three categories of HCI evaluation methods—inspection, empirical, and formal/analytical. Further, attendees will learn what type of evaluation technique(s) and metrics are best suited to different goals and situations, taking into account the unique challenges of evaluating robot interaction. Lecture and discussion will be interspersed with hands-on tasks in which groups of participants will evaluate a robot interface.

More information: https://hri2009.org/2008/12/05/tutorial-using-and-adapting-human-computer-interaction-evaluation-methods-for-hri/

Topics

• Robot companions
• Lifelike robots
• Assistive (health & personal care) robotics
• Remote robots
• Mixed initiative interaction
• Multi-modal interaction
• Long term interaction with robots
• Awareness and monitoring of humans
• Task allocation and coordination
• Autonomy and trust
• Robot-team learning
• User studies of HRI
• Experiments on HRI collaboration
• Ethnography and field studies
• HRI software architectures
• HRI foundations
• Metrics for teamwork
• HRI group dynamics
• Individual vs. group HRI
• Robot intermediaries
• Risks such as privacy or safety
• Ethical issues of HR
• Organizational/society impact

Formatting

All papers for the conference must be submitted in PDF format and conform to ACM SIG Proceedings specifications.

• Templates for Word, Word Perfect, and LaTeX2e can be found here.
• All submissions must use only “Type 1” (scalable) fonts (not bitmapped fonts).  This is a requirement for proceedings to appear in the ACM digital library.
• Page limit is 8 pages (including figures and references).

Please be aware that the proceedings will be printed in black and white (grayscale). Thus, if your paper contains color, we suggest that you verify that the figures or images reproduce well when printed in black and white.

Submitting

Submit your paper through the https://www.precisionconference.com/~hri website. All authors will be invited and are strongly encouraged to participate in the review process.

Important Dates

• 15 September 2008: Submission of full papers, and tutorial/workshop proposals. Submissions will close at 11:59 pm EDT
• 01 December 2008: Submission of videos
• 12 December 2008: Notification of acceptance for full papers and videos (updated!)
• 5 January 2009: Submission of late-breaking short abstracts (updated!)
• 8 January, 2009: Notification of acceptance of late breaking short abstracts (updated!)
• 12 January, 2009: Final camera-ready full papers due
• 13 January, 2009: Upload of camera ready full papers and camera ready late breaking short abstracts (updated!)
• 15 January, 2009: Submission of workshop papers
• 31January, 2009: Application deadline for travel grants in relation to student volunteering