Organizer: ICDL-EpiRob Workshop on Naturalistic Non-Verbal and Affective Human-Robot Interactions

This full-day workshop will investigate the sensorimotor and affective mechanisms that underlie human-robot interaction. Non-verbal and affective cues and expressions used to foster cooperation, mutual understanding and signal trustworthiness are manifested by humans all the time. If these cues are not appropriately reciprocated, however, the interaction can be negatively impacted. Moreover, inappropriate reciprocation, or lack thereof, may be the result of misperception and or non-timely reactions. Failure to adequately account for biologically plausible perceptual and temporal facets of interactions may detract from the quality of human-robot interaction and hinder progress in the field of social robotics more generally. For more information on the Workshop, click here.

Incorporation of naturalistic and adaptive forms of sensorimotor and affective human-robot non-verbal communication is challenging because such interaction is highly dependent on the context and the relationship between the observer and the expresser. Biological species based interaction often requires explicit forms of social signalling such as nodding, nonverbal gestures, emotional expressions, etc., the interpretation of all of which may be highly context-sensitive. Furthermore, naturalistic social signalling may involve a certain degree of mimicry of autonomic responses such as pupil dilation, blinking, blushing, etc. which, in human-robot interaction requires the implementation of time-sensitive perceptual mechanisms currently underused in both commercial and research robotics platforms.

In this workshop, we will investigate and discuss to what extent the aforementioned naturalistic social signalling capabilities needs to be accounted for in human-robot interaction and what modalities are more relevant, and in what contexts. The workshop will focus strongly on research motivated by naturalistic empirical data. We hope to provide a discussion friendly environment to connect with research covering complementary interests in the areas of: robotics, computer science, psychology, neuroscience, affective computing and animal learning research.

The primary list of topics covers the following (but not limited to):

• Emotion recognition
• Gesture recognition
• Social gaze recognition
• The development of expression and recognition capabilities
• Joint visual attention and activity
• Alignment in social interactions
• Non-verbal cues in human-robot interaction

Call for Papers

Prospective participants in the workshop are required to submit a contribution as:

    Short paper (max 4 pages)

Submissions must be in PDF following the standard IEEE conference style. Send your PDF manuscript indicating [ICDL-EPIROB 2019] in the subject to:

    nng@ieee.org

Important Dates

Organizers