Abstract
========
The development of robots capable of interacting with humans has made
tremendous progress in the last decade, leading to an expectation that in
the near future, robots will be increasingly deployed in public spaces, for
example as receptionists, shop assistants, waiters, or bartenders. In these
scenarios, robots must necessarily deal with situations that require
human-robot interactions that are short and dynamic, and where the robot
has to be able to deal with multiple persons at once. To support this form
of interaction, robots typically require specific skills, including robust
video and audio processing, fast reasoning and decision making mechanisms,
and natural and safe output path planning algorithms. This physically
embodied, dynamic, real-world context is the most challenging possible
domain for multimodal interaction: for example, the state of the physical
environment may change at any time; the input sensors must deal with noisy
and uncertain input; while the robot platform must combine interactive
social behaviour with physical task-based action such as moving and
grasping. This workshop aims to bring together researchers from a range of
relevant disciplines in order to explore the challenges and solutions for
multimodal interaction in this area from different perspectives. The
workshop will feature two invited speakers, along with oral presentations
of long papers and a Pecha Kucha-style session with short overviews of
ongoing research in this area.


Invited speakers
================
- Daniel Gatica-Perez (confirmed), Idiap Research Institute, Martigny,
Switzerland, http://www.idiap.ch/~gatica/
- Another speaker to be announced shortly


Topics
======
Contributions to the workshop are sought in all areas relevant to the
overall goal of the workshop, including -- but not limited to -- the
following topics:

- intention recognition
- knowledge representation and reasoning
- activity recognition
- multimodal fusion
- person tracking
- multimodal interaction management
- speech recognition in noisy environments
- robust spoken language processing
- cognitive robotics
- natural language generation
- audiovisual signal processing
- design of service robots / interaction systems in public spaces
- planning and decision making under uncertainty
- evaluation of robots in real-world contexts

These topics cover a wide range of research communities including
multimodal interaction, dialogue systems, human-robot interaction,
robotics, automated planning, computer vision, and signal processing. Due
to the interdisciplinary nature of the workshop topic, relevant
contributions from other fields will also be welcome.


Submission formats
==================
We welcome two categories of paper submissions:
- Long papers: (max 6 pages) These papers should report work in progress or
completed work. Authors of long papers that are accepted by the Programme
Committee will be invited to give a talk on the paper.
- Late breaking reports: (2 pages) These papers should describe work in
progress, preliminary results, or highlights of recently completed work.
Authors of accepted late-breaking reports will be invited to present a
Pecha Kucha talk and/or a poster.

Formatting instructions and detailed submission instructions are available
through the workshop web site at
http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~mef3/icmi-2014-workshop-hri/


Important dates
===============
15 July 2014 Long paper submission deadline
15 August 2014 Long paper notification
5 September 2014 Camera-ready deadline
16 November 2014 Workshop in Istanbul, Turkey as part of ICMI 2014


Organisers
==========
Mary Ellen Foster, Heriot-Watt University
M.E.Foster@hw.ac.uk

Manuel Giuliani, fortiss GmbH
giuliani@fortiss.org

Ron Petrick, University of Edinburgh
rpetrick@inf.ed.ac.uk