Call for Papers

The 4th Workshop on Public Space Human-Robot Interaction (PubRob 2017)
MobileHRI: Mobile Human-Robot Interaction

To be held as part of MobileHCI 2017
4 September 2017
Vienna, Austria

http://pubrob2017.pubrob.org/

IMPORTANT DATES

Position paper submission deadline: 19 May 2017
Paper notification: 9 June 2017
Final camera-ready papers due: 21 July 2017
Workshop in Vienna, Austria: 4 September 2017

WORKSHOP OVERVIEW

This workshop aims to bring together researchers from Human-Robot
Interaction (HRI) and mobile HCI to explore issues of mutual interest and
act as a bridge between the two communities.

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. In
these settings, robots must often deal with situations that require
socially appropriate human-robot interactions of a specific nature:
interactions that are short and dynamic, and where the robot has to be
able to deal with multiple persons at once. In order to do so, 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. Mobility is also a key requirement
in many of these systems and research in this area shares a number of
challenges with the mobile HCI community, including the development of
systems and infrastructures for mobile devices, and methods for studying
human-robot interactions outside the lab. Issues related to the management
of battery life, dynamically-changing conditions like lighting, and
background noise must also be addressed. As a result, research on public
space robots is often fundamentally different from other work in social
robotics and HRI/HCI, but presents opportunities for cross-fertilisation
between the HRI and mobile HCI communities.

The workshop programme will include a tutorial-style introduction to HRI,
invited talks, lightning talks from workshop participants, and an
opportunity for extended discussion. This workshop is the fifth in a
series of meetings (and the fourth workshop) organised around the theme of
public space human-robot interaction. Details of previous events can be
found on the PubRob website at: http://pubrob.org/

TOPICS

Contributions to the workshop are sought in all areas relevant to the goal
of the workshop including, but not limited to:

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

Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the workshop topic, relevant
contributions from other related fields, especially in mobile HCI, are also
welcome.

SUBMISSIONS

Prospective workshop participants are encouraged to submit a short
position papers (max. 2 pages) on one or more of the above topics,
outlining their work or interest in the area. Papers will be reviewed by
the programme committee for relevance and accepted papers will be
presented at the workshop during a lightning talk session (see proposed
schedule, below). Students are particularly encouraged to submit position
papers and participate in the lightning session as a means of receiving
feedback on their research from the community. Accepted papers will also
form the workshop proceedings and be posted on the workshop website.

Papers should be formatted using the SIGCHI paper format available from:

http://www.sigchi.org/publications/chipubform

and submitted through the PubRob 2017 submission site on EasyChair:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=pubrob2017

INVITED SPEAKERS

The following invited speaker has confirmed she will participate in the
workshop:

- Astrid Weiss, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
https://astridweiss.wordpress.com/about/

Additional speakers will be announced closer to the workshop date.

ORGANISERS

Mary Ellen Foster
School of Computing Science
University of Glasgow, UK
MaryEllen.Foster@glasgow.ac.uk

Manuel Giuliani
Bristol Robotics Laboratory
University of the West of England, UK
manuel.giuliani@brl.ac.uk

Ron Petrick
School of Mathematical & Computer Sciences
Heriot-Watt University, UK
R.Petrick@hw.ac.uk