Open Letter to the HRI Community

Dear Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) Community,

We are delighted to announce the tenth annual HRI Conference in 2015. With your contributions and commitment, HRI has become an established, top-tier venue for publishing and following state-of-the-art research in human-robot interaction. According to Google Scholar Metrics [1], HRI has become the venue with the 8th highest impact among human-computer interaction (HCI) conferences and journals and 13th in robotics. To ensure and enhance the ongoing success of the conference, we are planning a number of changes to the peer-review process for HRI 2015 that we would like to share with you.

Establishing Contribution-Specific Review Criteria

The HRI community is made up of a highly diverse community of researchers that includes computer scientists, engineers, social scientists, designers, etc. Our collective body of knowledge incorporates different types of contributions entailing new technologies, designs, methods, and knowledge. To acknowledge and encourage this diversity in the peer-review process, we are establishing different sets of review criteria for different types of contributions. For instance, contributions that entail new technologies that enable new forms of interaction will be evaluated against review criteria developed for technological work in HRI (algorithms, computational methods, robot systems). We have identified five contribution types that represent HRI research from which authors will be asked to choose:

  1. Studies of Human-Robot Interaction (i.e., studies of interaction with prototype or deployed robot systems)
  2. Enabling Technologies (i.e., technologies that facilitate new forms of interaction)
  3. Enabling Designs (i.e., designs that promote new forms of interaction)
  4. Enabling Methods (i.e., methods that make new forms of interaction or HRI research possible)
  5. Enabling Knowledge (i.e., knowledge that informs future HRI design or HRI research)

More information on the different contributions types can be found at HRI 2015 themes.

Creating Contribution-Specific Program Subcommittees

Five subcommittees have been created to handle the review process. Each subcommittee will follow specific review criteria appropriate for the subcommittee focus in order to make recommendations that the entire program committee will evaluate and finalize. Each subcommittee is led by a senior researcher and a subcommittee of members with leadership and expertise on the type contribution. The subcommittee chairs are:

  1. Takayuki Kanda, ATR, Japan for Studies of Human-Robot Interaction
  2. Nicholas Roy, MIT, USA for Enabling Technologies
  3. Jodi Forlizzi, CMU, USA for Enabling Designs
  4. Greg Trafton, NRL, USA for Enabling Methods
  5. Manfred Tscheligi, University of Salzburg & AIT, Austria for Enabling Knowledge

The subcommittee descriptions, including the list of PC members in each subcommittee, can be found on the Program Committee page.

Double-Blind Reviews

HRI has traditionally followed a single-blind review process, but recent research has shown strong evidence for the numerous benefits of a double-blind review systems for improving research integrity and diversity [2, 3]. The HRI 2015 review process will use a double-blind system.

More information on how to prepare double-blind submissions for HRI 2015 is available on the Author Guidelines for Preparing Blind Submissions.

We hope that these changes will enable the HRI conference to attract a diverse set of high-quality contributions, contributing to the continuing success of the conference and the growth of our community. We welcome and appreciate feedback, comments, and questions from the HRI community on these improvements, so please feel free to contact us at pc-chairs-hri2015@humanrobotinteraction.org.

Best wishes,

HRI 2015 Program Chairs
Bilge Mutlu & Leila Takayama

HRI 2015 General Chairs
Julie Adams & Bill Smart

References

[1] Google Scholar Metrics (2014). Accessed August 15, 2014. URL: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&vq=eng_robotics&view_op=list_hcore&venue=D6qw-B7Hrk0J.2014

[2] McKinley, K. S. (2008). Editorial: Improving Publication Quality by Reducing Bias with Double-Blind Reviewing and Author Response. ACM SIGPLAN Notices, 43(8): 5–9. URL: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/mckinley/notes/blind.html

[3] Wallach, H. (2013). The Benefits of Double-Blind Review. Blog post dated June 20, 2013. URL: https://people.cs.umass.edu/~wallach/publications/wallach13benefits.pdf