SLMI 2016 - Social learning and multimodal interaction for designing artificial agents

To go beyond scripted and artificial interaction, social agents should be able to learn with or from humans. Such complex skills emerge from a complete understanding of the inner mechanisms of social interactions, in particular on the awareness of the user’s actions, behaviours, and mental and emotional states and on the coherent production of multimodal, verbal and non-verbal communication skills in a human-like manner.
In recent years, advances on this field contributed to the development of several kinds of agents able to face a broad range of social situations: human aware robot partners in industries, companion agents for children or for elderly people, social robots in public or in personal spaces, virtual avatars as educational tools at school and so on. Such experiences shown how this domain cannot be solely approached from a pure engineering perspective: human sciences, social sciences, developmental sciences, play a primary role on the development and the enhancement of social interaction skills for artificial agents.
The results achieved by researchers are particularly important to allow naïve people to interact in their everyday life with naturally communicative agents. This is impacting markets opening new social and economic opportunities for industries.
The scope of this workshop is to present rigorous scientific and philosophical advances on social interaction and multimodal learning for social agents, welcoming contributes on both theoretical aspects as well as on practical application, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration between researchers on the domain as well as with industrial partners.