Call for papers / participation:
Social interaction with intelligent indoor robots

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: JANUARY 21, 2008

Workshop topics

The conference theme is "Human-Centered Robotics". Robots are moving into human everyday life. The question what we could do to achieve this is, although interesting for us as engineers, not the ultimate question we should ask. Robots are moving into human everyday life. This implies an inherent social dimension to this technology. The question is thus foremost, what we should – and should not – do. The objective of this workshop is to define interactive, intelligent indoor robots as a social technology. We want to consider what the technology we need to develop should look like. So that these robots seamlessly fit into an environment that was not made nor intended for them.

Considering indoor robots as social agents, we want to look at the social dimensions of interaction with intelligent indoor robots, and its implications for how (and what) such robots should understand about their environments. We want to focus on three related, core issues:

Unnatural naturalness

A robot is a robot, and not a human. As with the issue of anthropomorphism, we can ask to what extent interaction with a robot should be human-like. How natural is "natural" interaction supposed to be?

The dimensionality of HRI's social dimension

Human-robot interaction as interaction is a social affair – but what dimensions are there to this social dimension of human-robot interaction? What kinds of social interaction do we imagine indoor robot assistants to perform? How should it behave, appropriately, in such situations – and what types of intelligent capabilities will a robot need to have to do so?

Robustly failing

If there is one surety about robots, it s that sooner or later they fail. Fail to understand, fail to behave. What are principled ways to make interaction robust? And, even more important, how can we make interaction degrade gracefully?

Workshop target audience

We aim to bring together an audience which would represent multiple relevant disciplines – robotics, artificial intelligence, natural language processing. This would include people building personal robot assistants, either in industry or at academic institutes; people developing approaches to human-robot interaction; and people studying the impact such personal robot assistants have, or may have, on social environments.

Submission format

The workshop invites submissions describing original work, either completed or still in progress, related to social interaction with intelligent indoor robots.

The format for each submission follows the general ICRA format: 6 to 8 pages, including figures and bibliography, using the ICRA LaTeX style-files. Submissions should be sent as PDF file to the following address:

Possible topics include, but are not restricted to, the following:

• user studies in social interaction
• (semantic) environment models for human-robot interaction
• (semantic) models of social interaction
• integrated systems for intelligent, interactive indoor robots
• multi-modal dialog modeling
• models of error recovery
• feedback design
• human-centered representation (of the environment)
• situation awareness
• social action recognition and understanding / reasoning

Every submission should address one or more of the above-mentioned core issues: to what extent should interaction be human-like? what are social aspects of the interaction? how robust is the interaction, and how does it gracefully degrade?

The submission deadline is JANUARY 15, 2008.

Papers will be published in a proceedings volume made available at the time of the workshop. A selection of papers accepted for publication at the workshop may get invited for a volume to be submitted for publication to Springer.