Call for Papers
The Mutual Shaping of Human-Robot Interaction
A workshop held in conjunction with IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (IEEE RO-MAN 2017)
Lisbon, Portugal
August 28-31, 2017
www.mutualshapinghri.com
Submission deadline for workshop papers: June 1, 2017
WORKSHOP TOPIC
The field of robotics has rapidly advanced over the last decades and shown great promises in different fields. After robots were introduced in industry decades ago, advancements in robotic systems have enabled them to increasingly enter and affect our everyday lives. Nowadays, we see robotic systems being introduced as assistants, team-mates, care-takers, and companions, in diverse contexts such as education, health and eldercare, the home, and in search and rescue. This development has started the discussion on the emotional, ethical and societal consequences of the increasing confrontations and interactions between humans and robots.
Studies in human-robot interaction have shown that, when robots enter different contexts of our everyday lives, they can influence and change that particular context beyond its intended use purpose alone. The term mutual shaping explains the detailed process of technological design suggesting that society and technology are not mutually exclusive to one another and, instead, influence and shape each other. Society changes as a direct result of the implementation of technology that has been created based on society’s wants and needs. The mutual shaping of technology and society approach focuses on analyzing how social and cultural factors influence the way technologies are designed, used, and evaluated, as well as how technologies affect our construction of social values and meanings.
The decisions made in the design, adoption, use, and evaluation process affect human’s attitudes towards, uses of, and even their conceptualizations of these (socially) interactive systems. Social norms, values and morals are both implicitly and explicitly intertwined with technologies, reinforcing or altering our beliefs and practices. Once a robot has entered a social environment, it will alter the distribution of responsibilities and roles within that environment, including how people act in that situation or use context. Accordingly, studies that show how use practices of robot systems and the social environment mutually shape each other, and what forms this mutual shaping process takes, is crucial for the future development of robots for broad societal use. This knowledge is required to inform the design and acceptance of new and existing robot systems.
CALL FOR PAPERS
The aim of this workshop is to inform the robotics community and its many stakeholders about lessons learned so far about the mutual shaping of robots and society. We will focus on how social factors affect whether people choose to use robots, and how robot design factors affect the social contexts in which robots are used. We welcome prospective participants to submit extended abstracts (max. 4 pages including references) covering any relevant topic contributing to the discussion on the mutual shaping effect(s) of robots and society. The goal is to discuss a wide variety of contributions from the many disciplines and approaches that intersect with the development and evaluation of robot systems (e.g. Human-Human Interaction, Human-Computer Interaction, Human-Robot Interaction, Human Factors User-Experience, engineering, computer sciences, (interactive) design, sociology, anthropology, psychology, etc.). We invite a diversity of topics from researchers and practitioners from a wide variety of fields who address strategies and lessons learned about mutual shaping of robots and society including, but not limited to:
- Human-robot (non)use
- Human-Robot interaction
- Mutual shaping of robots and society
- Evaluation of robot applications and contexts of use
- Socially intelligent robotics
- Multimodal assessment technologies
- Design of robotics systems
- Social analysis of robotics
- Social cognitive systems
The manuscripts should use the conference format. Please submit a PDF copy of your manuscript to s.benallouch@saxion.nl and maartje_de_graaf@brown.edu.
TIMELINE
June 1, 2017: Submission deadline for workshop papers
June 22, 2017: Notification of acceptance
July 5, 2017: Camera-ready workshop papers deadline
July 10, 2017: Workshop program finalized
August 28-31, 2017: Main conference
August 27 or September 1, 2017: Workshop day
WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS
Somaya Ben Allouch – Saxion University of Applied Sciences, The Netherlands
Maartje de Graaf – Brown University, USA
Selma Sabanovic – Indiana University, USA
Friederike Eyssel – Bielefeld University, Germany