ECR 2016 - Symposium on ENABLING COMPUTING RESEARCH IN SOCIALLY INTELLIGENT HUMAN-ROBOT INTERACTION: A COMMUNITY-DRIVEN MODULAR RESEARCH PLATFORM

Advances in sensor and communication technologies have facilitated progress in computing research on physical platforms. The field of human-robot interaction (HRI) has grown significantly in the last decade and a half, and actively brings together an interdisciplinary community of researchers across computing, AI, robotics, and social science. However, progress has been limited by the lack of affordable, general-purpose, modular hardware robot platforms with available low-level software that would enable large numbers of computing researchers to enter the field and develop and test algorithms, as well as conduct statistically significant user studies by deploying systems in the real world and collecting user data to inform further computational research in HRI.
The goal of this symposium is to kick off the process of community-informed design and development of the low-cost HRI hardware and software platform, to be developed by the symposium organizers, with NSF support. The hardware design will involve advances in user-centric yet affordable design, safety, modularity, generality, and system integration. The software design will involve novel general algorithms and open source robust code bases that enable the hardware platform to operate "out of the box" with a set of socially intelligent behavior primitives enabling computing researchers to focus on their areas of interest without having to develop low-level robot control algorithms and code. Both the robot hardware and software necessary for pursuing the computational, AI and noncontact HRI challenges have unique requirements driven by the need to be socially aware and socially expressive. The resulting platforms must be capable of recognizing social signals, reasoning over those signals, and generating appropriate behaviors in response.
The symposium will present initial hardware design ideas and plans, along with exploratory exercises to determine the usability of proposed software systems as well as the fit of capabilities with the community's needs. Our "design by quorum" is combined with modular design that centers on creating a standard vetted by the community and builds on recent technologies to minimize cost. The symposium will address computing challenges that bridge AI, human-computer interaction (HCI), service robotics, and other related areas. Therefore, advances made through the discussion at the symposium will serve to push the field forward, thereby impacting the computing community at large, including AI and robotics.
Topics
Symposium topics include, but are not limited to the following:
Recognition and generation of fundamental social behaviors, such as spacing (that is, where to be), eye gaze (that is, where to look), natural language (that is, what to say), body language (that is, how to act), and timing (that is, when to act), among others
Dialog/interaction management, decision-making, and learning
Computational models of social dynamics and interaction patterns in human-robot interactions
Mapping, localization, path-planning, and navigation in human environments
Context/situational awareness and scene understanding in human-robot social interactions
Online adaptation to human social behavior and interaction contexts
Long-term learning of human behaviors, preferences, and needs
Software architectures, tools, and systems for facilitating human-robot interactions
Sensor, mechanical, and computational hardware for enabling human-robot interactions
Ethics in the design of social robot hardware and software