WARN24: Weighing the benefits of Autonomous Robot persoNalisation August 26, 2024

Weighing the benefits of Autonomous Robot persoNalisation

The importance of personalisation in Human-Robot Interaction has already shown its advantages in multiple scenarios and will become a prevalent direction for the field. Robots are required to adapt their behaviour in both short- and long-term interactions. In the short term, as the interactions are very often limited, robots need to learn from scratch the user's preferences and adapt quickly to them. In the long term, users' needs may change, and robots must continuously adapt to keep them engaged and interested over time. Personalisation can greatly improve short- and long-term interactions in various real-world scenarios by fostering trust and rapport, increasing adherence to the interaction, enhancing engagement through tailored content, and improving task performance. Nonetheless, it is essential to consider whether and to what extent personalisation can benefit interactions and users. Robots developed as end-to-end systems for conducting social interactions can amplify cultural biases and gender and age stereotypes. Therefore, discussing when personalisation is desired or required and when it should be avoided is crucial. In contexts such as healthcare and education, personalisation can lead to inadequate care or support and lower acceptance of the professionals who use the technology (teachers and healthcare professionals). Additionally, collecting personal data to provide tailored assistance can raise privacy concerns, as many machine learning algorithms are not transparent to users. Furthermore, deep learning algorithms may amplify existing biases, hindering the primary goal of making interactions more engaging and trustworthy.The workshop explores the complex area of personalisation and behavioural adaptation in social human-robot interaction (HRI), examining both their benefits and drawbacks. It allows diverse researchers from various fields, including psychology, neuroscience, computer science, robotics, and sociology, to come together.

List of Topics

• Personalisation in short and long-term HRI
• User modelling in HRI
• Robot's personality
• Context and situation awareness for robots
• Engagement evaluation and re-engagement strategies
• Personalised dialogue with robots
• Personalised non-verbal behaviour with robots
• Adaptive human-aware task planning
• Theory of Mind for adaptive interaction
• Machine Learning for robotic personalisation
• Lifelong (continual) learning for adaptation
• Adaptation in multimodal interaction
• Affective and emotion-adapted HRI
• Persuasion in HRI
• Culture-aware robots
• Evaluation metrics for adaptive robotic behaviour
• Ethical implications of personalisation
• Robot customisation and teaching

Submission Guidelines

The submitted contribution do not need to be anonymised (single-blind review process). A panel of experts from relevant fields will be asked to review the contributions, selecting the most relevant, novel, original and high-quality ones to be included in the workshop program. Authors of accepted submissions will be invited to join the panel discussion. The workshop aims to lay the foundations for a potential journal publication, using the insights and discussions generated during the sessions. Participants will be encouraged to actively contribute to the journal to ensure diverse perspectives and comprehensive coverage of the topics discussed, thereby increasing the impact of the results. For this reason, the workshop program will alternate interactive activities with panel sessions and keynote presentations. This will enhance the comprehension of the topic while maintaining an engaging structure for the audience.

Organisers

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to warn-workshop@proton.me