Call: Workshop on Children, Robots, and Virtual Agents: Present and Future Challenges (at IDC 2021)

Call for Papers

Workshop on Children, Robots, and Virtual Agents: Present and Future Challenges
At IDC 2021 – ACM Interaction Design and Children conference 2021
[Online] Athens, Worldwide
26 June 2021 or 27 June 2021
Workshop: https://www.techresearch4children.com/
IDC 2021: https://idc.acm.org/2021/

KEY DATES

Deadline for Paper Submission: 12 April 2021
Paper Acceptance Notification: 26 April 2021
Camera-ready Paper: 10 May 2021
Workshop Date: 26 June 2021 or 27 June 2021

ABSTRACT

Research on child-agent interaction is rapidly expanding. It is, therefore, necessary to converge our collective efforts to broaden our understanding and perspectives of how virtual agents, affect and potentially improve the well-being of children.

“Children, Robots and Virtual Agents: Present and Future Challenges” follows our International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR) 2020 workshop on child-robot interactions. In this full-day workshop, we will focus on the unique technical and empirical challenges of designing and conducting child-agent interactions. In light of the current pandemic situation, we will also address the challenges and adaptations of conducting research under the “new normal” to understand how researchers overcome these challenges and what we can learn and keep in the future. We also aim to join the virtual agents and robotics communities to learn from each other and discuss both areas’ common and specific challenges.

Our primary goal is to provide an opportunity for an interdisciplinary debate about the present and future of child-agent interactions. We want to bring together researchers, practitioners and pioneers from relevant disciplines and create collaboration opportunities.

As part of the workshop, we will have a collaborative activity where our participants will work together and brainstorm about intelligent agents in different time frames (past, present and future). We will also have a panel of experts discussing the topics of this workshop and answering participants’ questions.

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION AND TOPICS OF INTEREST

This full-day workshop will focus on the unique challenges of child-agent interaction and provide a venue for participants to have in-depth discussions about designing interactions with children in mind, now and in the future. Moreover, we want to discuss and collect insights from the adaptations made to keep researching during a pandemic. Our main goal is to establish an interdisciplinary debate and create networking opportunities.

This workshop follows from our ICSR 2020 workshop on child-robot interactions, expanding it to include non embodied agents and adaptations made to accommodate the “new normal”.

Topics of Interest

  • Design and deployment challenges.
  • Adapting to the “new normal”.
  • Experiments involving children and agents.
  • Challenges of safe child-agent interaction.
  • Children’s involvement in design and development.
  • Children’s perception (measuring, evaluating, and interpreting).
  • Expectations for future interactions.
  • The impact of the agents on children’s cognitive development.
  • Ethical Concerns.

PUBLICATIONS

Accepted short papers and position papers will be published on the website. We plan to publish a workshop report that focuses on the findings from our activity and panel session on SIGIR Forum or similar platforms.

Moreover, we are organizing a special issue on Interaction Studies – Social Behaviour and Communication in Biological and Artificial Systems and we invite participants to submit their work*.

* Authors are requested to submit their full research papers, complying with the general scope of the journal. The submitted papers will undergo the standard peer-review process before they can be accepted.

PANELISTS

Jill Lehman (https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jef/)
Iolanda Leite (https://iolandaleite.com/)
Maarten Van Mechelen (https://pure.au.dk/portal/en/persons/maarten-pieter-p-van-mechelen(4d8bfdc1-d2a8-40e5-a440-259b64a7e61c).html)
Shuli Gilutz (https://sites.google.com/site/shuligilutz/home)

ORGANISING COMMITTEE

Elmira Yadollahi
Dr. Shruti Chandra
Dr. Marta Couto
Dr. Angelica Lim
Dr. Anara Sandygulova

CONTACT

All questions about submissions should be emailed to the workshop organizers at child.robot.future@gmail.com

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