IWINAC2015: Sessions

Chairpersons:

Emilia Barakova, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
Robert Lowe, University of Skövde, Sweden
Erik Billing, University of Skövde, Sweden
Joost Broekens, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

The aim of this workshop is to capture emerging trends and common problems related to the interaction autonomy of social robots. In the past, issues related to the constitutive autonomy of social robots have been focused on safe interaction with the environment, and with humans. Today, we see a shift towards social robots that act in human environments and to a larger degree need to act in relation to social and emotional aspects. A nursing robot must not only interact safely with its environment, it should act in a way that communicates care and respect for patients, and that supports the social bounds necessary for the task. Further, many social signals should be embedded in the functional behaviors of robots, not added to the behavioral repertoire as specific gestures. Finally, the interpretation of social signals coming from humans should be integrated with the current robot behavior controller, and depending on the type of controller this is, thus, a different process. So far, robots works with what could be called “perceived” emotions and social abilities, i.e., additions to its instrumental abilities. This focus of this workshop is instead the following question: How can emotion and social interaction be grounded in the behavioral repertoire of the robotic system? This includes sub questions as: is the robot able to have intrinsic emotions; how could emotions, grounded in the embodiment of the robot, provide socially adaptive behavior to the robot; and how can the communication of emotions between a robot and a human be grounded.
The workshop welcomes conceptual papers and convincing applications, as well as concrete methods and algorithms relevant for the topic.
This Workshop is a part of IWINAC conference which provides a broad and interdisciplinary forum for novel and provoking ideas together with well-grounded computational studies. The paper has to be written according to the instructions given here. We are in the process of arranging a special issue in Tomson rated journal based on submissions to the workshop.
Topics include but are not limited to:

Grounding synthetic/robotic emotions in modelled neurophysiological processes
Neural network models of emotional learning and decision making
Algorithms and investigations of emotion facial expression, prosody and posture
The role of emotions in applications of HRI Computational models for grounding emotions
Applications of emotions that enrich the interaction between robot and humans.
Emotions in crowds of virtual robots
Dance notations for grounding communication of emotions
First and third person perspectives for emotion interpretation

Submission Deadline	February 15, 2015
Acceptance notification and start of registration	April 1, 2015
Acceptance notification and start of registration	April 30, 2015
Workshop date	b/n June 1-5, 2015

IWINAC2015: Workshop

Robot autonomy revised: Grounding emotional and social interaction in robot behaviour