Please visit the individual workshop websites for their Call for Papers and deadlines.

Workshop 1 (Full day): HRI Face-to-Face: Gaze and Speech Communication

Frank Broz, Hagen Lehman, Yukiko Nakano, Bilge Mutlu
The purpose of this workshop is to explore the relationship between gaze and speech during "face-to-face" human-robot interaction. As advances in speech recognition have made speech-based interaction with robots possible, it has become increasingly apparent that robots need to exhibit nonverbal social cues in order to disambiguate and structure their spoken communication with humans. Gaze behavior is one of the most powerful and fundamental sources of supplementary information to spoken communication. Gaze structures turn-taking, indicates attention, and implicitly communicates information about social roles and relationships. There is a growing body of work on gaze and speech based interaction in HRI, involving both the measurement and evaluation of human speech and gaze during interaction with robots and the design and implementation of robot speech and accompanying gaze behavior for interaction with humans.

 

Workshop 2 (Full day): Design of human likeness in HRI from uncanny valley to minimal design

Hidenobu Sumioka, Takashi Minato, Hiroshi Ishiguro, and Pericle Salvini

Human likeness of social agents is crucial for human partners to interact with the agents intuitively since it makes the partners unconsciously respond to the agents in the same manner as what they show to other people. Although many studies suggest that an agent's human likeness plays an important role in human-robot interaction, it remains unclear how to design humanlike form that evokes interpersonal behavior from human partners. One approach is to make a copy of an existing person. Although this extreme helps us explore how we recognize another person, the Uncanny Valley effect must be taken into account. Basic questions, including why we experience the uncanny valley and how we overcome it should be addressed to give new insights into an underlying mechanism in our perception of human likeness. Another approach is to extract crucial elements that represent human appearance and behavior, as addressed in design of computer-animated human characters. The exploration of minimal requirement to evoke interpersonal behavior from human partners provides more effective and simpler way to design social agents that facilitate communication with human. This full-day workshop aims to bring together the prominent researchers from different backgrounds in order to present and discuss the most recent achievement in design of humanlike in a wide range of research topics from uncanny valley effects and minimal design of human-robot communication.

 

Workshop 3 (Full day): Collaborative Manipulation: New Challenges for Robotics and HRI

Anca Dragan, Andrea Thomaz, and Siddhartha Srinivasa

Autonomous manipulation has made tremendous progress in recent years, leveraging new algorithms and capabilities of mobile manipulators to address complex human environments.  However, most current systems inadequately address one key feature of human environments: that they are populated with humans. What would it take for a human and robot to prepare a meal together in a kitchen, or to assemble a part together in a manufacturing workcell? Collaboration with humans is the next frontier in robotics, be it shared workspace collaboration, assistive teleoperation and sliding autonomy, or teacher-learner collaboration, and raises new challenges for both robotics and HRI. A collaborative robot must engage in a delicate dance of prediction and action, where it must understand its collaborator's intentions, act to make its own intentions clear, decide when to assist and when to back off, as well as continuously adapt its behavior and enable customization. Addressing these challenges demands a joint effort from the HRI and robotics communities. We hope that this workshop will not only serve to attract more roboticists into the HRI community under this unifying theme, but will also create valuable collaborations to explore this rich, interdisciplinary area. We welcome high-quality work in all areas related to collaborative manipulation.

 

Workshop 4 (Half day): Applications for Emotional Robots

Oliver Damm, Frank Hegel, Karoline Malchus, Britta Wrede and Manja Lohse

In social interaction between humans expressing, recognizing, and understanding emotions is essential. Therefore, artificial emotions are also being exploited to improve human-robot interaction (HRI) and to build robots that interact in a more human-like and intuitive manner. Some characteristics of this kind of robots are to express/perceive emotions, to communicate with (highlevel) dialogues, to learn/recognize models of other agents, to establish and maintain social relationships, and to develop social competencies. These socially interactive robots are used for different purposes, e.g. as toys, as educational tools, or as research platforms. Thus, for the engineering side of robotic research it is necessary to create robots for specific contexts, requirements, and expectations. With this half day workshop we open up a platform to discuss different interdisciplinary perspectives on the application of robots that are able to display and perceive emotions. We want to develop an idea of how the context influences the characteristics that an emotional robot needs to have and to gain new insights in the role of emotions in HRI.

 

Workshop 5 (Half day): Probabilistic Approaches for Robot Control in HRI (Cancelled)

Amin Atrash and Ross Mead

Sociable robots in real world domains must quickly and accurately make decisions to produce appropriate social behaviors in human-robot interactions (HRI). To do this, a robot must reason over natural human communication mechanisms, such as speech, gesture, attention, and other body language. These multimodal data are inherently noisy and complex. Probabilistic techniques have been successfully applied to the modeling of these types of data. Such approaches have also demonstrated their utility in traditional robotics applications, including mapping, localization, navigation, manipulation, and higher-level planning. The objective of this workshop is to discuss the application of probabilistic approaches to further enable robot autonomy in HRI, as well as address the shortcomings and necessary improvements in current techniques needed for robust socially intelligent behavior. This workshop will investigate the use of probabilistic approaches, such as Bayesian networks and Markov models, for robust robot control and decision-making under uncertainty. Target applications range from social behavior primitives—such as gesture, eye gaze, and spacing—to higher-level interaction planning and management systems.

 

Workshop 6 (Full day): Human-Robot Interaction Pioneers Workshop

Solace Shen (Chair), Astrid Rosenthal-von der Pütten (Co-Chair)

The eighth annual Human-Robot Interaction Pioneers Workshop will be held in Tokyo, Japan on Sunday, March 3rd, 2013. Exploring human-robot interaction in a welcoming and interactive forum, HRI Pioneers is the premiere venue for up-and-coming student researchers in the field. This highly selective workshop is designed to empower innovators early in their careers and assembles together a cohort of the world’s top student researchers seeking to foster creativity, communication, and collaboration across the incredibly diverse field of human-robot interaction. Workshop participants will have the opportunity to learn about the current state of HRI, to present their research, and to network with one another and with select senior HRI researchers. Participation in the Pioneers Workshop is determined through an independent competitive application process (deadline December 1, 2012). For more information, and details on how to apply, please visit the workshop website at: https://www.hripioneers.info/