As robots enter our homes and workplaces, they will have more direct access to us, our information, and our daily lives.  The more a robot knows about us, the more helpful it can be, at least in theory.  Where is the balance between privacy and utility?  How might the robot communicate the tradeoffs between privacy and utility in a nuanced but clear manner?  How can a robot learn information that it can use to better help you, without being intrusive?  What behaviors should the robot have (or not have) to not only ensure that it protects our privacy, but also is perceived as protecting our privacy?  How can we measure the effectiveness of these behaviors, so that we can track our progress towards more useful, less invasive robot companions?

This workshop is the the third in a series at HRI, and will bring together researchers from a wide variety of intellectual communities to look at these questions, identify promising research directions, and set an agenda for how to start making progress.

We invite the following types of contributions:

• Full research papers (up to 6 pages, without counting references) giving the results of completed work in privacy-sensitive robotics.
• Position papers (up to 4 pages, without counting references), where the authors describe an area of privacy-sensitive robotics that they believe is important and worth looking at.Experience reports, where authors describe how privacy-related concerns have impacted a project, their research, a robot deployment, or some other event related to HRI.Survey papers, drawing together work that is relevant the privacy-sensitive robotics community.We encourage participation from “privacy-curious” researchers who want to contribute to brainstorming, even if they don’t have formed positions or experiences with privacy-preserving HRI. 
• Short paper (3 to 4 four pages, without counting references) or an extended abstract (1 page, without references) for participation* in our workshop by February 9th, 2024 AoE (Anywhere on Earth) We encourage the use of IEEE Proceedings specifications for paper submission,  Templates are available at this link (US letter). In addition, the IEEE has partnered with Overleaf, where you can start writing using this link directly. No blind submission is needed. All submitted papers and extended abstracts will undergo a thorough review process.

*Note that in order to participate in the workshop, at least one author needs to register for the HRI conference with (or only) workshop option and attend in person. All accepted papers will either present their work through a lightning talk or through a poster. We will aim to publish all accepted works together on our workshop website.

Topics: The workshop welcomes contributions across a wide range of topics including, but not limited to: 

• Privacy-by-design approaches
• Trust in human-robot Interactions
• Ethics in AI and robotics
• Explainable AI and transparency for data
• Legal considerations for privacy in robotics
• Personalization and social learning in robotics
• Robots in information-rich and sensitive environments
• Real world challenges in collection of user information

Important Dates:

Submission deadline: February 9th, 2025 AoE (Anywhere on Earth).

Notification of acceptance: February 16th, 2025, AoE.

Camera-ready deadline: March 1st, 2025, AoE.