Special Session of RO-MAN2014, Multimodality in Multiparty Interaction with Social Robots:
Exploring HRI in the Real World (MiMI2014)

IEEE, RO-MAN 2014
The 23rd IEEE International Symposium on
Robot and Human Interactive Communication
Edinburgh, Scotland
25-29th, August, 2014

Important Date

Paper Submission Deadline: 16 February 2014 -> extended!! 23 February 2014

Motivation and goals of the session

If we want robot (and other technical) systems to engage in everyday situations with humans and allow users to interact with them in natural ways, we have to both understand and model the multimodal complexity of communication and social interaction. While an important body of research in human-robot-interaction (HRI) has explored such capabilities in laboratory settings which offer the benefit of controlled experimental conditions, the investigation of real-world scenarios reveals in particular the situated nature of multimodal interaction: Interactional practices are rooted in meaningful structures of the material world (Streeck et al. 2011, Goodwin 2000) and the use of different communicational resources – talk, gesture, gaze, posture – is intertwined and adjusted to these material structures. Communicational situations are not limited to a dialogue between two parties, but often involve multi-party situations with changing numbers of participants (Pitsch et al. 2013). To develop robot systems that can autonomously and successfully engage in such complex situations, a thorough understanding of human-robot-interaction in real-world scenarios is necessary.

While the investigation of human-robot-interaction in the real-world is only emerging recently, a longstanding tradition of exploring ‘natural settings’ exists in fields such as Communication Studies, Workplace Studies or Computer-Supported Cooperative Work which make use of methods from e.g. ethnographic fieldwork or sequential analysis based on Conversation Analysis. In this Special Session, we aim at bringing together researchers from these fields with scholars in informatics and robotics to explore the synergy between both analysis of and modeling for multimodal human-robot-interaction in the real world.

Call for Papers

We welcome contributions related to the following topics, but are not limited to:

  • Multimodal sequential structures in HRI
  • Communication and interaction strategies for social robots (e.g. small talk, indirect cues)
  • Computer-mediated interactions in daily life (e.g., video conference)
  • Media-mediated interaction (e.g., remote human-robot interaction supported by computer technologies
  • Data mining in real space (e.g., meeting mining)
  • Multimodal behavioral analysis and modeling
  • In situ studies of behavioral modalities in HRI

We explicitly encourage an interdisciplinary dialogue between both Social Robotics/Human-Robot-Interaction, Human-Computer-Interaction and Workplace studies, Conversation Analysis and Ethnographic studies.

Templates and Submission Procedure

    Authors should use the templates provided by the electronic submission system. The templates for US Letter format paper should be used.

  • See the following URL for the detail,TEMPLATES
  • You can gain the templates from the following URL,Support
  • When you submit your papers, you need to enter the code of this session. Invited session identification code: jjbtv

Paper Length and Size

Submissions should not exceed 6 pages. Any extra pages must be paid for separately . The maximum file size is 2 MB.

Previous experiences

Mayumi Bono has organized MiMI workshops in 2011, 2012, and 2013 as a part of JSAI International Symposia on AI (isAI), supported by The Japan Society for Artificial Intelligence (JSAI). We have been trying to cover a broader perspective of interaction studies, communication studies, conversation analysis, and workplace studies and their application to other research fields including, but not limited to, human-computer-interaction (HCI) and human-robot-interaction (HRI). This special session will be organized as fourth meeting of MiMI. The History of MiMI workshops can be found here:
MiMI2011
MiMI2012
MiMI2013

Karola Pitsch has previously (co-)organized a range of workshops linking HRI and Conversation Analysis, such as the panel “Interacting with Robots and Virtual Agents“ at IIEMCA 2013 and workshops at previous Ro-Man conferences (2009, 2011) focusing on methodological aspects of an interdisciplinary approach to investigating HRI (e.g. “Analyzing Data in HRI. Integrating Perspectives”).

Selma Sabanovic has been one of the main organizers and a co-chair of the International Workshop on Collaborative Robots and Human Robot Interaction at the Collaborative Technology Symposium in 2011, 2012, and 2013, all held in the United States. She also co-organized a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded workshop on Human-Centered Robotics in Istanbul, Turkey in 2011, and was an organizer and co-chair of the AAAI Spring Symposium on Multidisciplinary Collaboration for Socially Assistive Robotics in 2007.

List of organisers (including short bio)

  • Mayumi Bono (National Institute of Informatics)
  • Mayumi Bono received her Ph.D. in Linguistics and Communication Studies from Kobe University in 2005. Her academic paths are diverse. After the completion of her Ph.D., she became a researcher at Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR) and Department of Intelligence Science and Technology, Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University. While she was a Research Fellow (PD) of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), she visited University of California, Los Angels and Department of Anthropology, University of Texas, Austin as a visiting scholar. Since 2009, she has been an assistant professor at National Institute of Informatics (NII). Her research projects about face-to-face interactions and signed conversations are based on ethnography and Conversation Analysis (CA).

  • Karola Pitsch (Bielefeld University and CITEC)
  • Karola Pitsch received her PhD in Linguistics from Bielefeld University, Germany (2006). She has held positions as postdoctoral researcher in EU-projects at King’s College London, UK (2005-2008) and the Research Institute for Cognition and Robotics at Bielefeld University (2008-2011). In 2011, Karola became a Dilthey Fellow funded by the Volkswagen Foundation and Principal Investigator of projects within the CRC 673 ’Alignment in Communication’ and the Centre of Excellence ‘Cognitive Interaction Technology’ (CITEC). She has undertaken research stays in France, USA, Japan and Argentina. Karola’s research focuses on Interactional Linguistics and Multimodal Communication in everyday, professional and technologically mediated settings. She uses also insights from Conversation Analytic research – combined with quantitative approaches – to inform the design and modeling of Human-Robot/Agent-Interaction, and explores how users perceive and co-construct a robot’/agent’s interactional skills.

  • Selma Šabanović (Indiana University Bloomington)
  • Selma Šabanović is an Assistant Professor of Informatics at Indiana University, Bloomington, a post she has occupied since August 2009. She completed her PhD in Science and Technology Studies from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2007, after which she worked as a lecturer at Stanford University's Program in Science, Technology and Society from 2008-2009. In 2005, Selma was a visiting scholar at the Intelligent Systems Institute in AIST, Tsukuba, Japan and the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Her work combines the social studies of computing, focusing particularly on the situated design, use, and consequences of socially interactive and assistive robots in different social and cultural contexts, with research on human-robot interaction (HRI) and social robot design. She employs interdisciplinary frameworks and methods, including ethnography and in situ evaluation of robots, in her research.

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