ICRA 2023 Workshop: Towards a Balanced Cyberphysical Society: A Focus on Group Social Dynamics
Workshop topic
In recent years, we have witnessed a slew of household robots introduced to the market, be it in the form of an embodied personal assistant or a service robot. The adoption of robots in the home will continue as humans are getting comfortable having them around. Human-robot interaction and social robotics have so far commonly focused on attracting people to interact with robots directly and measuring engagement with the robot as a main aspect of interaction success. But this is not always the case, as robots can also be used as mediators and instigators of interaction among people, rather than replacing them in the interaction. With this in mind, we aim to explore how robots can assist people in interacting more with each other in a society in which robots and humans co-exist.
This workshop will cover the following topics for robotics and society:
(1) Intergenerational Interactions, such as between members of a family, between children and older adults at an intergenerational care facility, or between young and older adults in a mixed living facility. We want to design robots to mediate intergenerational demographics, minimizing the effects of generation gap.
(2) Cross-cultural interchange, such as among children in a school or between a group of children in a classroom to another group of children in another country. We want to enable robots to facilitate children to engage toward a healthy exchange of ideas and discussion of diverse topics that foster understanding and bridge the cultural divide.
(3) Interconnectivity and Interfaces of Intelligent Devices such as IoT, telepresence, intelligent systems and other home devices. We want to develop robots to act as a mediator not only with people but also with other intelligent devices embedded in the ecosystem in a hybrid cyberphysical society (Sendhoff 2020)
(4) Interdisciplinary Collaboration in developing robot functionality and design aimed for a much broader impact for society at large.
In addressing the abovementioned topics, the workshop will explore the state-of-the-art of the different Measures of success for social robotics and human robot interaction that brings positive impact on individual users (e.g. enjoyment, engagement), and more recently on small groups (e.g. better group cohesion, task completion). We also see robot design as needing to incorporate a broader understanding of benefit, which can reflect community-level goals and the societal impacts that robot development and use will bring about. This requires looking at robot design that goes beyond the robotic artifacts, but also takes into account the human groups and institutions it is a part of – how they are organized, what their aims and values are, who different relevant stakeholders are, and how the robot will fit into these broader networks of people, practices, and goals. We see the way to develop these systems as requiring research in and with communities of users. With this in mind, we will also look at how roboticists can work directly with different communities (e.g. eldercare institutions, schools and classrooms with their students) to co-design robot functions for their use and to study how those functions affect the work and goals of the community.
Topics of interest (not limited to)
Devices for human-robot interaction and connection
Robot hardware design for long-term and safe interactions
Human perception and understanding
Societal consequences and effects of robots
Ethical evaluation of human-robot interaction
Understanding of social context, group dynamics and team formation
Interaction principles for appropriate mediation and intervention
Design of mediated group interactions and shared activities
Automation of robot behavior for intervention and life support
Contextual perception and sense-making
Human-robot collaboration
Human expectations and trust towards machines
Robots in education, entertainment and healthcare
The role of art and design in human-centered robotics
Teleoperation and telepresence robots
Social robots and embodied agents
Invited Speakers
Satoshi Shigemi (Honda Research Institute Japan, President)
Talk: “At your service! Developing Intelligent Machines for Society”.
Bio: Since 1987, Satoshi Shigemi has been conducting research on robots and control systems at Honda R&D Co. In 2000, he was the project lead for the research and development of ASIMO, humanoid robot. He then developed a high-altitude survey robot for the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Currently, he serves as President of Honda Research Institute Japan.
Astrid Rosenthal van der Putten (University of Aachen)
Talk: Rethinking Robots in Groups and Teams – Precedents for and consequences of robotic team/group membership.
Bio: Astrid Rosenthal-von der Pütten is a full professor and director of the chair Individual and Technology at RWTH Aachen University. Her research interests include social effects of artificial entities, human-robot interaction, linguistic alignment with robots and virtual agents, as well as presence and communication in social media.
Marynel Vazquez (Yale University)
Talk: Interaction-Shaping Robotics - the behaviors and attitudes exchanged between two (or more) other agents.
Bio: Marynel Vázquez is an Assistant Professor in Yale’s Computer Science Department, where she leads the Interactive Machines Group. Her research focuses on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), especially in multi-party settings. Marynel is a recipient of the 2022 NSF CAREER Award and two Amazon Research Awards. Her work has been recognized with nominations to best paper awards at HRI (in 2023 and 2021), IROS (2018), and RO-MAN (2016 and 2022). Prior to Yale, Marynel was a Post-Doctoral Scholar at the Stanford Vision & Learning Lab and obtained her M.S. and Ph.D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University, where she was a collaborator of Disney Research. Before then, she received her bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering from Universidad Simón Bolívar in Caracas, Venezuela.
Kerstin Fischer (University of Southern Denmark)
Talk: Influencing Social Dynamics: A Robot Mediator for Increasing Empathy towards Remote Participants
Bio: Kerstin is professor for Language and Technology Interaction at the University of Southern Denmark and director of the Human-Robot Interaction Lab in Sonderborg. She has published 9 books, 35 journal articles and more than 100 conference papers, in which she brings her background in linguistics, communication and multimodal interaction analysis to the study of behavior change, persuasive technology and human-robot interaction.
Submissions
We invite extended abstracts of up to 2 pages for poster presentation, and short papers of up to 4-6 pages for oral presentations in the workshop. Submissions must be sent in pdf, following the IEEE ICRA conference style (two-columns), through Easy Chair:
Submission link: click here.
If you have a video (not longer than 3 minutes) to supplement your written submission, we encourage you to submit it. We hope to have a short video session as part of the workshop if we get enough interesting videos!
Important dates
Submission deadline: May 17, 2023
Notification of acceptance: May 21, 2023
Workshop: May 29, 2023
Organizers
Randy Gomez, Chief Scientist, Honda Research Institute Japan
Selma Sabanovic, Professor, Informatics and Cognitive Science, Indiana University Bloomington
Vicky Charisi, Research Specialist, European Commission– Joint Research Center
Georgios Andrikopoulos, Assistant Professor, Mechatronics and Embedded Control Systems, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
Deborah Szapiro, Media Arts and Production Program, University of Technology Sydney
Angelo Cangelosi, Professor, Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, UK
Nawid Jamali, Senior Scientist, Honda Research Institute USA
Natasha Randall, Indiana University Bloomington, Informatics, Indiana University Bloomington
Luis Merino, Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Spain
Schedule
9.00 - 9.30
Welcome and introductions
9.30 - 10.05
Keynote speaker: Kerstin Fischer
10.05 - 10.40
Keynote speaker: Marynel Vázquez
10.40 - 11.00
Coffee break
11.00 - 12.00
Paper talks (10 mins):
A Study on Social Robot Behavior in Group Conversation
Group Dynamics: Survey of Existing Multimodal Models and Considerations for Social Mediation
Emotional Understanding for Social Robot Haru via Human-Centered Reinforcement Learning
Social Robot Mediator for Multiparty Interaction
Navigating Conversations around Privacy: Social Robots in the Family Home
Why is My Social Robot so Slow? How a Conversational Listener can Revolutionize Turn-Taking
12.00 - 12.35
Keynote speaker: Satoshi Shigemi
12.35 - 14.00
Lunch break
14.00 - 14.40
Ice breaker and design activity
14.40 - 15.15
Keynote speaker: Virginia Dignum
15.15 - 16.05
Paper talks (10 mins):
On the Design of a Soft Robotic Neck for the Social Robot HARU
Where to Look during Conversation: Autonomous Attentive Behavior Learning for Social Robot via Deep Reinforcement Learning
What Could a Social Mediator Robot Do? Lessons from Real-World Mediation Scenarios
Trust and Transparency during Troubleshooting Faulty Social Robots
How Did They Come Across? Lessons Learned from Continuous Affective Ratings
16.05 - 16.25
Coffee break
16.25 - 17.00
Keynote speaker: Astrid Rosenthal-von der Pütten
17.00 - 17.30
Discussion and wrap-up
17.40 - 18.00
Walking together for dinner