Please visit the workshop websites for their Call for Papers and deadlines.
Workshop 1 (Full day)
Applications for Emotional Robots
Oliver Damm, Christian Becker-Asano, Manja Lohse, Frank Hegel, Britta Wrede
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, from an engineering perspective it is necessary to create robots for specific contexts, requirements, and expectations. With this second full day workshop we aim to continue our discussion of 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 2 (Full day)
Socially assistive robots for the aging population: Are we trapped in stereotypes?
Astrid Weiss, Jenay Beer, Takanori Shibata, Markus Vincze
Robots taking care of the older population in care facilities and at home are an ongoing theme in HRI research. Research projects on this topic exist all over the globe in the USA, Europe, and Asia. All of them have the ambitious goal to increase the well-being of older adults and to enable them to stay at home as long as possible. However, the recent Special Eurobarometer 382 on “Public attitudes towards robots” revealed that the wider public does not want robots to take care of the older population, subsequently in this workshop we want to reflect if the HRI community is trapped in stereotypes when it comes to socially assistive robots for older adults? Therefore we want to gather and compare findings from user needs analysis, user evaluation studies, as well as interaction scenarios and functionalities of existing care robots. Are our results suggesting similar scenarios? Do older end users in all countries have similar needs and desires when it comes to assistive robots? What are the challenges and opportunities for future assistive robots (maybe for those we develop for ourselves when we belong to the older population…) also on an ethical and legal level? In this workshop we want to escape the stereotype trap what socially assistive robots should do. Can socially assistive robots solve the aging population problem (individually and societal)? Are older people in general technology opponents? Will robotic helpers be accepted in the home as long as they pretend to be social actors?
Workshop 3 (Half day)
Attention Models in Robotics: Visual Systems for Better HRI
Michael Zillich, Simone Frintrop, Fiora Pirri, Ekaterina Potapova, Markus Vincze
Attention is a concept of human perception that enables human subjects to select the potentially relevant parts out of the huge amount of sensory data and that enables interactions with other human subjects by sharing attention with each other. These abilities are also of large interest for autonomous robots, therefore, interest in modeling concepts of human attention computationally has increased strongly in the robotics community during the last decade. Especially in human-robot interaction, the ability to detect what a human partner is attending to and to act in a similar way to enable intuitive communication, are important skills for a robotic system. Still, there exists a gap in knowledge transfer between researchers in human attention and robotic researchers with their specific, often task-related, problems. Both communities can mutually benefit from each other by sharing ideas. In the workshop, researchers in visual and multi-modal attention can profit from the rapidly growing field of robotics, which offers new and challenging research questions with very concrete applicability to challenging problems. Robotic researchers can learn how to integrate attention to support natural and real-time HRI.
Workshop 4 (Full day)
HRI: a bridge between Robotics and Neuroscience
Alessandra Sciutti, Katrin Lohan, Yukie Nagai
A fundamental challenge for robotics is to transfer the human natural social skills to the interaction with a robot. At the same time, neuroscience and psychology are still investigating the mechanisms behind the development of human-human interaction. HRI becomes therefore an ideal contact point for these different disciplines, as the robot can join these two research streams by serving different roles. From a robotics perspective, the study of interaction is used to implement cognitive architectures and develop cognitive models, which can then be tested in real world environments. From a neuroscientific perspective, robots could represent an ideal stimulus to establish an interaction with human partners in a controlled manner and make it possible studying quantitatively the behavioral and neural underpinnings of both cognitive and physical interaction. Ideally, the integration of these two approaches could lead to a positive loop: the implementation of new cognitive architectures may raise new interesting questions for neuroscientists, and the behavioral and neuroscientific results of the humanrobot interaction studies could validate or give new inputs for robotics engineers. However, the integration of two different disciplines is always difficult, as often even similar goals are masked by difference in language or methodologies across fields. The aim of this workshop will be to provide a venue for researchers of different disciplines to discuss and present the possible point of contacts, to address the issues and highlight the advantages of bridging the two disciplines in the context of the study of interaction.
Workshop 5 (Half day)
Algorithmic Human-Robot Interaction
Brenna Argall, Sonia Chernova, Kris Hauser, Chad Jenkins
Intelligent behavior in robots is implemented through algorithms. Historically, much of algorithmic robotics research has neglected the human element. However, today’s robots are increasingly being used to empower the daily lives of people across work, leisure and domestic tasks, bringing to the forefront the need for entirely new technical approaches that incorporate the abilities to perceive, interpret, and react to humans. It is important for HRI and algorithmic researchers to develop closer ties in order to make progress toward the mutually shared, long-term vision of human-friendly robots. Such robots will need sophisticated algorithms to generate interpretable, socially-acceptable behavior, enforce safety around humans, and execute tasks of value to society.
Workshop 6 (Half day)
Cognitive Architectures for Human-Robot Interaction
Paul Baxter, Greg Trafton
Developments in autonomous agents for Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) are gathering pace. The typical approach to such efforts is to start with application to a specific interaction context and then try to generalise to different contexts. Alternatively however, the application of Cognitive Architectures emphasises generality in the first instance, which affords a number of advantages. This workshop will provide a forum to introduce and discuss the application (both existing and potential) of Cognitive Architectures to HRI. By attending, participants will gain insight into how such a consideration of Cognitive Architectures complements the development of autonomous social robots.
Workshop 7 (Half day)
Humans and Robots in Asymmetric Interactions
Anna-Lisa Vollmer, Lars Schillingmann, Katharina J. Rohlfing, Britta Wrede
Robots are not human. They might in some cases have a similar appearance but different strengths and limitations. In this sense, an interaction with a robot is asymmetric. When interacting with a robot one is unsure what to expect as the appearance does not necessarily make its abilities obvious. In human-human interaction asymmetric interactions also occur. In an interaction with a child for example adults have to adapt to their partner’s capabilities and understanding. Also, interactions with persons with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) are asymmetric in the sense that they process information differently. In this half-day interdisciplinary workshop we want to discuss the topic of asymmetry in interaction. With a focus on how both partners develop linguistic and non-linguistic interaction strategies online in an interaction, the scope of this workshop ranges from parallels of human-human and human-robot asymmetric interaction to determining factors as well as methods that are capable of supporting communication in asymmetric interactions. Humans for example cannot always find successful ways to communicate in asymmetric interactions with robots and even toward humans. Their expectations might be incorrect and expected abilities different from the real abilities of the interaction partner. By bringing together researchers working on the area of asymmetric interaction concerning both human-human and human-robot interaction, this workshop aims to develop novel views on interaction understanding and modeling.
Workshop 8 (Full day)
Culture Aware Robotics
Matthias Rehm, Maja Mataric, Tatsuya Nomura, Bilge Mutlu
Culture is not the first aspect that comes to mind when discussing human robot interaction. But our cultural upbringing does to a large degree influence our patterns of behavior and interpretation. Thus, culture is present in the development of robotic systems right from the start, unconsciously influencing how robots look, what we envision with them to do, and how they are programmed to interact with the user. Thus, culture significantly shapes how we interact with each other and with other social entities such as robots, and a better understanding of cultural differences and commonalities will have significant scientific, design, and societal implications. This workshop aims at improving awareness on the topic and facilitates communication among researchers from different cultures and those interested in culture as a factor in interacting with robots. The scientific focus of the activity is directed to culturally‐aware robotics, which refers to a brand‐new area in social robotics and human robot interaction and is closely related to the emergence of the field of culture aware computing in computer science and related disciplines. The main focus is on understanding the influence of culture on many human processes that affect human-robot interactions be it directly or indirectly. Culture aware robots can thus be defined as robotic systems, where culture‐related information has had some impact on its design, runtime or internal processes, structures, and/or objectives.
Workshop 9 (Full day)
Timing in Human-Robot Interaction
Guy Hoffman, Maya Cakmak, Crystal Chao
For robots to play an engaging role in humans’ lives, they need to display accurately meshed joint behavior, as humans are highly sensitive to timing and interaction fluency. Timing plays a role in a range of human-robot interaction scenarios: It is central to spoken dialogue, with turntaking, interruptions, and hesitation affecting both efficiency and emotional response. Nonverbal behavior such as gestures, gaze, and other communicative cues is similarly sensitive to timing. Beyond communication, the temporal synchronization of functional actions is necessary for sharing resources and physical space, and also affects human perception of robotic teammates. Last but not least, timing is crucial to the success of performance, musical, and entertainment robots, as well as for effective gesture production in expressive robotic companions. Recent years have seen a growing interest in the HRI community in the various research topics related to human-robot timing. The purpose of this workshop is to explore and discuss theoretical approaches, models, systems, empirical studies, and interdisciplinary insights related to the notion of timing, fluency, and rhythm in human-robot interaction.
Workshop 10 (Full day)
Experimenting in HRI for Priming Real-World Setups, Innovations and Products
Paolo Barattini, Gurvinder S Virk, Nicole Mirnig, Maria Elena Giannaccini, Adriana Tapus, Fabio Bonsignorio
Robotics is moving towards real-world applications, beyond the well structured environment of industrial robotic uses and applications. In the world of assistant robots and medical robots, human-robot interactions are an essential feature. This holds also for newly emerging industrial scenarios in which there is value-added need of the human in the loop. The companies that develop robotics products for this new market are confronted with the lack of guidelines and standards on how the higher features of HRI may be safely incorporated. On the other side, although the scientific research is burgeoning and worthy of praise, it is clear from the produced evidence that the results are scattered and not capable of giving a clear-cut input to be easily taken up by companies and standardization organizations like ISO and IEC. The workshop is in line with the conference themes especially in the areas of HRI for the integration of empirical findings into complex real-world robot systems by focusing on three typical scenarios (industrial, service and medical) to develop systematic approaches to benchmark and evaluate experimental systems so that normative results can be realized rapidly. The present workshop has the aim of bringing together scientists, representatives of robotics companies and of standardization working groups to foster discussion in the definition of experimental scenarios and protocols in HRI, so to be able to prime real-world setups and be targeted to help realize the robotic products of the future.
Workshop 11 (Full day)
2014 HRI Pioneers Workshop
Brittany Duncan, Tamara Lorenz, Sonja Caraian, Lorin Dole, Victor Gonzalez, Bradley Hayes, Laura Hoffman, Malte Jung, Justin Storms, Katelyn Swift-Spong
The 2014 HRI Pioneers Workshop will be conducted in conjunction with the 2014 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). The 2014 HRI Pioneers Workshop will provide a forum for graduate students and postdocs to learn about the current state of HRI, to present their work and to network with one another and with select senior researchers in a setting that is less formal and more interactive than the main conference. Workshop participants will discuss important issues and open challenges in the field, encouraging the formation of collaborative relationships across disciplines and geographic boundaries. A keynote presentation from Dr. Tony Belpaeme will be followed by a panel discussion featuring senior researchers. Short presentations from two former Pioneers will feature advice on starting a research program and the transition from student to researcher.
