March 11, 2024 - 2:00PM - 6:00PM MST time

SS4HRI: Social Signal Modeling in Human-Robot Interaction

Workshop at HRI2024; UMC Dennis Small Cultural Center

This workshop focuses on the understanding and modeling of social signals to create human-aware HRI. The three fundamental themes are: understanding social signals (gain insights into human internal states), modeling social signals for the generation of a human's mental state (translating social signals into actionable computational models), and operationalizing human models for human-aware applications (integrating these cognitive models into robotic systems to develop new human-aware capabilities). 

The invited speakers, flash-talk sessions, and discussions will aim to focus on the social science background of social signals, acquisition and availability of benchmarking datasets, social signal modeling techniques, integration of models into real-time systems, usage of these models—such as error management, personalization, and mental model alignment—and applications of these models (i.e., healthcare, education, manufacturing). We expect these topics to demonstrate how modeling social signals, both explicit and implicit, is necessary for fluent, intuitive and trustworthy interactions.


This workshop aims to bring together researchers—who are interested in advancing the understanding of social signal modeling and its application in HRI systems, designing and development of robotic systems, and discussing data-driven approaches to modeling and interpreting social signals. We want to encourage an interdisciplinary approach and include participants involved in HRI, machine learning, and affective computing.