CARs 2014 - International Workshop on Culture Aware Robotics

Culture is not the first aspect that comes to mind when discussing human robot interaction. But our cultural upbringing does to a large degree influence our patterns of behavior and interpretation. Thus, culture is present in the development of robotic systems as well as of embodied agent systems right from the start, unconsciously influencing how robots look, what we envision with them to do, and how they are programmed to interact with the user. Thus, culture significantly shapes how we interact with each other and with other social entities such as robots and agents, and a better understanding of cultural differences and commonalities will have significant scientific, design, and societal implications. This workshop aims at improving awareness on the topic and facilitates communication among researchers from different cultures and those interested in culture as a factor in interacting with robots and embodied agents. The scientific focus of the activity is directed to culturally-aware robotics, which refers to a brand-new area in social robotics and human robot interaction and is closely related to the emergence of the field of culture aware computing in computer science and related disciplines. The main focus is on understanding the influence of culture on many human processes that affect human-robot interactions be it directly or indirectly. Culture aware robots can thus be defined as robotic systems, where culture-related information has had some impact on its design, runtime or internal processes, structures, and/or objectives.