SREC18: Social Robots in therapy: focusing on autonomy and Ethical Challenges Chicago, IL, United States, March 5, 2018 |
Conference website | https://sites.google.com/view/srec18/home |
Submission link | https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=srec18 |
Submission deadline | January 26, 2018 |
Acceptance notification | February 9, 2018 |
Camera-ready Deadline | February 23, 2018 |
ABSTRACT
The 1st workshop on Social Robots in Therapy: Focusing on Autonomy and Ethical Challenges, will be held in Chicago, USA on Monday, March 5, 2018 in conjunction with the 2018 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction.
Robot-Assisted Therapy (RAT) has successfully been used in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) research by including social robots in health-care interventions by virtue of their ability to engage human users in both social and emotional dimensions. Research projects on this topic exist all over the globe in the USA, Europe, and Asia. All of these projects have the overall ambitious goal of increasing the well-being of a vulnerable population. Typical, RAT is performed with the Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) technique, where the robot is controlled, unbeknownst to the patient, by a human operator. However, WoZ has been demonstrated to not be a sustainable technique in the long-term. Providing the robots with autonomy (while remaining under the supervision of the therapist) has the potential to lighten the therapist’s burden, not only in the therapeutic session itself but also in longer-term diagnostic tasks. Therefore, there is a need for exploring several degrees of autonomy in social robots used in therapy. Increasing the autonomy of robots might also bring about a new set of challenges. In particular, there will be a need to answer new ethical questions regarding the use of robots with a vulnerable population, as well as a need to ensure ethically-compliant robot behaviors. Therefore, in this workshop we want to gather findings and explore which degree of autonomy might help to improve health-care interventions and how we can overcome the ethical challenges inherent to it.
TARGET AUDIENCE AND TOPICS
Students of all levels pursuing research in a field related to Human-Robot interaction should consider applying.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- shared or full autonomy in robots in therapy,
- adaptive mechanisms for robots used in therapy,
- engagement in therapeutic human-robot interaction,
- ethical systems and challenges for robots in therapy,
- identified user needs at home and in-patient care facilities,
- acceptance studies on social robots used in therapy,
- patient-centered HRI studies,
- long-term therapeutic interaction studies,
- clinical validation of robot-assisted therapies.
IMPORTANT DATES
Jan 26th, 2018 (11:59 PM PT): Submission Deadline
Feb 9th, 2018: Notification of acceptance
Feb 23rd, 2018: Camera-ready deadline
SUBMISSION
Workshop candidates are requested to send a 1-2 page abstract before January 26th about a research related to the topics described above using this link.
In particular, the abstract should cover:
- a main research question or motivation of the work,
- background and related work,
- the research approach,
- results (if any), and a description of future work.
We explicitly encourage the submission of papers describing work in progress or containing preliminary results to discuss with the community.
All manuscripts must be submitted in PDF format using this link and will be peer-reviewed based on relevance to the workshop. A template can be found here. Please use the sample-sigconf.tex or ACM_SigConf.docx files.
ORGANIZERS
- Pablo Gomez Esteban - Robotics and Multibody mechanics, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium
- Daniel Hernández García - Centre for Robotics and Neural Systems, Plymouth University, Plymouth, UK
- Hee Rin Lee - Computer Science and Engineering, UC San Diego, USA
- Pauline Chevalier - HMI, University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands
- Paul Baxter - Lincoln Centre for Autonomous Systems, University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK.
- Cindy L. Bethel - Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Mississsippi State University, Mississippi State, Mississippi, USA