== Call for Contributions and Participation ==

== IEEE ICDL-EpiRob 2019 workshop on Naturalistic Non-Verbal and Affective Human-Robot Interactions ==

19th August 2019, Oslo, Norway

Website:
https://nicolas-navarro-guerrero.gitlab.io/workshop-non-verbal-human-robot-interactions-icdl-epirob-2019/

Humans continually manifest non-verbal and affective cues and expressions used to foster cooperation, mutual understanding and signal trustworthiness. If these cues are not appropriately reciprocated, however, the interaction can be negatively impacted. Moreover, inappropriate reciprocation, or lack thereof, may be the result of misperception and or non-timely reactions. Failure to adequately account for biologically plausible perceptual and temporal facets of interactions may detract from the quality of human-robot interaction and hinder progress in the field of social robotics more generally.

Incorporation of naturalistic and adaptive forms of sensorimotor and affective human-robot non-verbal communication is challenging because such interaction is highly dependent on the context and the relationship between the observer and the expresser. Biological species based interaction often requires explicit forms of social signalling such as nodding, nonverbal gestures, emotional expressions, etc., the interpretation of all of which may be highly context-sensitive. Furthermore, naturalistic social signalling may involve a certain degree of mimicry of autonomic responses such as pupil dilation, blinking, blushing, etc. which, in human-robot interaction requires the implementation of time-sensitive perceptual mechanisms currently underused in both commercial and research robotics platforms.

In this workshop, we will investigate and discuss to what extent the aforementioned naturalistic social signalling capabilities needs to be accounted for in human-robot interaction and what modalities are more relevant, and in what contexts. The workshop will focus strongly on research motivated by naturalistic empirical data. We hope to provide a discussion friendly environment to connect with research covering complementary interests in the areas of robotics, computer science, psychology, neuroscience, affective computing and animal learning research.

The primary list of topics covers the following (but not limited to):
* Emotion recognition
* Gesture recognition
* Social gaze recognition
* The development of expression and recognition capabilities
* Joint visual attention and activity
* Alignment in social interactions
* Non-verbal cues in human-robot interaction

=== Invited Speakers ===
Stefanie Höhl, University of Vienna, Austria
Christian Balkenius, Lund University, Sweden
Kerstin Dautenhahn, University of Waterloo, Canada

=== Important Dates ===
Paper submission deadline: 31th May 2019
Notification of acceptance: 14th June 2019
Camera-ready version: 1st August 2019
Workshop: 19th August 2019

Participants are invited to submit short papers (max. 4 pages) following the standard IEEE conference template, link at the workshop webpage. Send your PDF manuscript indicating [ICDL-EPIROB 2019] in the subject to: nng@ieee.org . Selected contributions will be presented during the workshop.

=== Organizers ===
Nicolás Navarro-Guerrero, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark
Robert Lowe, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Chrystopher L. Nehaniv, University of Waterloo, Canada