from [March 27, 2023] to [March 29, 2023]
HRI in Academia and Industry:
Bridging the Gap
Overview
The use of robots that operate in spaces where humans are present is growing at a dramatic rate. We are seeing more and more robots in our warehouses, on our streets, and even in our homes. All of these robots will interact with humans in some way. In order to be successful, their interactions with humans will have to be carefully designed. The field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) has been growing at the intersection of robotics, AI, psychology, and a number of other fields, for over a decade. However, until quite recently, it has been a largely academic area, with university researchers proposing, implementing, and reporting on experiments at a limited scale. With the current increase of commercially-available robots, HRI is starting to make its way into the industry in a meaningful way.
This symposium is intended to bring together HRI researchers and practitioners from both academia and industry to find common ground, understand the different constraints at play, and figure out how to effectively work together.
Themes
Constraints and Needs of HRI in Industry
What does industry mean when it says “HRI”? How is it different from product design?
What are the constraints of deploying HRI at scale in consumer robots?
What parts of academic HRI are most relevant to the industry?
What are the pressing HRI problems that the industry wants to solve? Why?
How do we measure the success of HRI in a consumer product?
What HRI research can we do in an industry setting that we can’t do in academia?
Relevance and Innovation of Academic HRI
What does academia mean when it says “HRI”?
What are the constraints of HRI research in an academic environment?
What industrial or consumer applications drive interesting academic HRI research?
What areas of HRI are academic researchers focused on? Why?
How do we measure the success of academic HRI beyond controlled experiments and p-values?
What HRI research can we do in an academic setting that we can’t do in industry?
Interaction between Academic and Industrial HRI: Publications, Conferences, Tools/Technology Resources, and Experiments
Should industrial HRI practitioners be publishing in conferences and journals? Should these papers look the same as academic HRI papers? Should they be held to the same standard?
What are the constraints of publishing in industry, and how do we address them?
How can academic and industrial HRI researchers collaborate meaningfully across the IP boundary?
How should industrial HRI researchers manage IRB review?
How can industry HRI research benefit more from science-driven approaches?
How can academic HRI research benefit more from real-world problems?
HRI Education and Training: What does Academia and Industry Need?
What does it mean to be an HRI researcher? Is the skill set the same in both the industry and the academy?
How should we be training future HRI researchers? What are the key skills they need for industry and academic career paths?
Since HRI can touch on all aspects of a robot system, how much HRI should robot hardware and software developers know?
How can HRI researchers from non-programming backgrounds integrate successfully with hardware and software development teams? How much technical background do they need to know?
Important Dates
January 31, 2023 — Contributed paper deadline
February 7, 2023 — Contributed paper notifications
February 21, 2023 — Camera ready papers due
March 27, 2023 - March 29, 2023 — Symposium
The goal of this symposium is to bring together researchers and practitioners working in HRI, in both academia and industry, and to form a community that is interested in breaking down the barrier between these two worlds.