Call for Papers

Inclusive HRI – Special Session at RO-MAN 2021
August 8-12, 2021 – Virtual
Website: https://ro-man2021.org/full-papers/

IMPORTANT DATES

• Paper Submission: March 21, 2021 (regular paper submission deadline)
• Notification of acceptance: May 25, 2021
• Camera ready papers due: June 20, 2021
• Conference: August 8-12, 2021

OVERVIEW

How can we improve robots’ capacity to interact successfully with all segments of the population? How can we prevent the implicit transfer of our bias into robots while designing interactions and related artificial intelligence software? Interactive robots are being deployed into homes, schools, shopping malls, hospitals, and retirement homes worldwide. Many of these robots use perception systems to recognize aspects of a user, and algorithmic bias can result in varying levels of interaction success, depending on race, culture, age, gender and other factors. Roboticists, in particular, burdened with real-time constraints and integration of many different skills onto one robot, often still use off-the-shelf solutions, which work with limited populations and situations. This special session on Inclusive HRI highlights the opportunity for roboticists to study the limitations and opportunities for inclusive HRI and build new perception, design and interaction techniques, towards robots capable of handling real-life, diverse populations.

We invite submissions from a wide range of disciplines, including computer science, psychology, robotics, neuroscience, cognitive science, and others, on topics including, but not limited to:

• Cross-cultural or culture-inclusive HRI
• Gender and HRI
• Ethnicity and HRI
• Age-inclusive HRI
• HRI for people with disabilities
• Inclusive perception, e.g. computer vision, speech recognition
• Algorithmic bias in HRI
• Transparency for inclusive HRI
• Roboethics

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Authors should follow the regular paper guidelines for RO-MAN, and during submission select “Inclusive HRI” for consideration in this Special Session category.

REVIEW and PUBLICATION

Papers submitted to special sessions will undergo the same review process as the main conference submissions and will appear in the main conference proceedings.

CONTACT

For any questions, please contact the Inclusion @ HRI organisers Angelica Lim (angelica@sfu.ca) and June Kang (june.kang@empathy-research.org)

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Angelica Lim, Simon Fraser University
June Kang, Korea University
Janderson Borges, Polytechnic University of Pernambuco
Shruti Chandra, University of Waterloo