Welcome to the Workshop on Cultural Influences in Human-Robot Interaction: Today and Tomorrow!

This full-day workshop will focus on the cultural influences in human-robot interaction. Robots have the potential to improve services in areas such as eldercare, rehabilitation, training, and education. However, social practices can be complex especially with different cultural backgrounds and norms which greatly influence individuals' behavior and interpretation patterns. How we eat, greet, and interact and what is socially acceptable to say or do can vary between countries, and even between regions of the same country. Similarly, how humans perceive robots is not universal, the meaning people attribute to a “robot” depends on their individual characteristics, one of them being their cultural backgrounds. With the rise of social robots, important design decisions need to be made regarding how robots should look, what people envision robots to do, which robot behaviors are socially acceptable, and how robots should interact with people (e.g. how robots should greet people ).

Cultural influences in HRI are not limited to interactions in particular domains (e.g., education, elder care, etc.). Robotized society will bring social and cultural transformation through time, one example being the marriage of robots and art, such as robot performers in theater acting and musical performance. This will play a role in the production of culture. More and more examples of robots in society have started to appear in different stages of life, including robots in religion, dance, and intimacy. These developments lead to a question: “how will be tomorrow with robots in human culture?” We welcome the papers that discuss robots in the future of human society.

With this workshop, we aim to raise awareness for the emerging field of culturally aware robots. Moreover, the workshop aims to bring the researchers together who are interested in cross-cultural HRI. It will also be a great opportunity for the researcher to receive feedback on their early-stage works. In addition, the workshop will provide networking for the researchers interested in this field to connect and explore collaboration possibilities that are particularly important for cross-cultural evaluations of the same robotic system.

Authors are invited to submit original, previously unpublished research papers written in English. All submitted papers will be reviewed by two reviewers from the program committee. All accepted papers will appear on the workshop website. For more information please see Submissions.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Cross-cultural similarities and differences in HRI

• Cultural robotics

• Cross-cultural comparisons of robots

• Culturally competent robots

• Challenges and implications of cultural robotics

• Design aspects of robots

• Robots' static and dynamic factors that are influenced by cultural norms

• Interaction modality differences in cultural background

• Cultural differences in understandable and explainable robots

• Human factors affecting the HRI on cultural background

• Human-centered design

• Theories, models, methodologies, and tools for evaluation of robots

• Interaction design process and methodologies

• Subjective and objective measures for evaluation of robots

• Robot roles, gender, stereotypes in different cultural backgrounds

• Robots in popular culture

• Values, ethics, policies for HRI

• Robots in art and creativity, machine performers

• Effects of culture on design, application, use, and evaluation of robots

• Acceptance, trust, perceived safety of robots in cultural differences