MMI 2014 - Special Session on Multimodality in Multiparty Interaction with Social Robots: Exploring HRI in the Real World

If we want robot (and other technical) systems to engage in everyday situations with humans and allow users to interact with them in natural ways, we have to both understand and model the multimodal complexity of communication and social interaction. While an important body of research in human-robot-interaction (HRI) has explored such capabilities in laboratory settings which offer the benefit of controlled experimental conditions, the investigation of real-world scenarios reveals in particular the situated nature of multimodal interaction: Interactional practices are rooted in meaningful structures of the material world (Streeck et al. 2011, Goodwin 2000) and the use of different communicational resources ? talk, gesture, gaze, posture ? is intertwined and adjusted to these material structures. Communicational situations are not limited to a dialogue between two parties, but often involve multi-party situations with changing numbers of participants (Pitsch et al. 2013). To develop robot systems that can autonomously and successfully engage in such complex situations, a thorough understanding of human-robot-interaction in real-world scenarios is necessary.
While the investigation of human-robot-interaction in the real-world is only emerging recently, a longstanding tradition of exploring ‘natural settings’ exists in fields such as Communication Studies, Workplace Studies or Computer-Supported Cooperative Work which make use of methods from e.g. ethnographic fieldwork or sequential analysis based on Conversation Analysis. In this Special Session, we aim at bringing together researchers from these fields with scholars in informatics and robotics to explore the synergy between both analysis of and modeling for multimodal human-robot-interaction in the real world.
We welcome contributions related to the following topics, but are not limited to:
Multimodal sequential structures in HRI
Communication and interaction strategies for social robots (e.g. small talk, indirect cues)
Computer-mediated interactions in daily life (e.g., video conference)
Media-mediated interaction (e.g., remote human-robot interaction supported by computer technologies)
Data mining in real space (e.g., meeting mining)
Multimodal behavioral analysis and modeling
In situ studies of behavioral modalities in HRI
We explicitly encourage an interdisciplinary dialogue between both Social Robotics/Human-Robot-Interaction, Human-Computer-Interaction and Workplace studies, Conversation Analysis and Ethnographic studies.