Call for Papers

Following the success of the first two editions of the Robo-Identity workshop, this workshop seeks to extend the discourse on artificial identity in robots with a particular emphasis on the fluid nature of robo-identity in our shared world. Specifically, this third edition focuses on questions regarding how the fluidity of robot identity can help enable personalized engagement, reverse the perpetuation of harmful social biases, and promote a future of more inclusive and adaptable technologies. This can be an opportunity to discuss questions such as:  How do we design robots that can adapt to individuals' and groups' evolving identities? How can robots cater to the changing needs and preferences of people? How can and should robots analyze and synthesize evolving human identity while effectively adapting over time? How should robot identity be presented? When would it be appropriate to adapt and present a particular robot identity? For a rich discussion on these questions during the workshop, we encourage submissions from various disciplines that present different perspectives and challenges when designing robo-identity in the shared world.

Themes

Theme 1: Personal and social identity

Personal identity is at the core of our individuality and is an evolving aspect of the self that changes with individual experiences and social influences. To have a clear sense of identity is to know "Who am I in my mind?"—a narrative rooted in one's life story, maintaining continuity from the past into the present. This stands in contrast to social identity, defining "Who am I in their mind?" as identity ascribed to us by others and mediated by culture and societal expectations. Take, for example, a person experiencing the onset of dementia. The person is on a journey of unbecoming as the condition progresses and eventually the sense of self shatters; the personal identity has de-developed while social identity in relation to others remains. The progressing condition of dementia can spark a conflict in the minds of caregivers between the identity of the person they once knew and the identity of the person before them now, raising questions like "What are we now?" Acknowledging these evolving dynamics is essential when designing human-robot interactions in the shared world. 

For this, we must recognize the complex, nuanced nature of human identity and design robots which honor this nuance and exist in harmony with its ever-changing nature. How do we design robots that can adapt to individuals' and groups' evolving identities? How can robots cater to the changing needs and preferences of people? Designing personalized technology is now possible with machine learning; How can and should robots analyze and synthesize evolving human identity while effectively adapting over time? Such adaptive robots open new possibilities in education, healthcare, and beyond by offering personalized learning experiences, assisting in caregiving for diverse patient needs, and promoting inclusivity by bridging the gap between extant technology and the realities of human culture and identity.

Theme 2: Designed identity

An adaptive robot identity can empower us to navigate the increasingly globalized and interconnected world, fostering empathy and understanding between humans. Similar to interactions with other humans, a robot's identity influences our engagement with it, raising questions like "Who is this robot?" in our mind. One way of shaping artificial identity and influencing human behavior with robots is through embodiment which involves conferring human-like or familiar traits upon the robot like gesture, gaze, voice, expressions, and touch. Thus, the question "How can we align the artificial identity features of a robot to its embodiment?" becomes important. Unlike human identity which is strongly tied to human form and culture, artificial identity can fluidly traverse physical, digital, and meta forms. For example, Siri exists across multiple devices, ranging from speakers and watches to phones, laptops, and even the upcoming Apple's Vision Pro in virtual reality. Designing adaptability in this sense entails enabling robots to fluidly tailor their responses across different embodiments by maintaining their artificial identity. Questions like "How should an agent behave when it transfers to another form?" and "How can we design for coherent multi-modal identity features across different mediums?". These questions arise from the need to design a unified identity across different embodiments. But could it be done the other way around? Could designing fluid robot identities, e.g., through role-taking, help in addressing the fragmented experiences people encounter, like with dementia? A role-playing robot in dementia could be a robot that assumes the role of a "bad cop" to manage negative behaviors like restricting unhealthy foods. Thus, designing for identity in robots opens up novel opportunities in designing human-robot interactions that enable personalized engagement and promote a future of more inclusive and adaptable technologies.

Theme 3: In the shared world

Robot identity consists of a series of observable design cues that could consist of many things such as robot name, appearance, speech, and behavior. The way in which any combination of these design cues is perceived as a single coherent robot identity or "persona" is dependent on who is perceiving it. However, the perception of robot identity becomes complicated considering the fluidity that could be involved. For instance, unlike human identity, robot identity could be distributed across multiple embodiments or even change from being presented in one embodiment to later being presented in another, either of which may be appropriate depending on a given context. Additionally, the robot identity presented in a particular embodiment can change in itself, potentially changing to a completely distinct artificial identity from one previously presented (e.g. the Furhat robot). With this fluidity, robot identity can be made to adapt to different human interactions and environments, potentially improving how robots interact in the shared world. This opens up questions of how should robot identity be presented, when would it be appropriate to adapt and present a particular robot identity, and how could robot identity account for human identity. 

Our social reality is defined by our interactions with each other, which identity often plays a key role in mediating. Therefore, social robots must also be able to master the presentation of identity in order for interaction to mesh with our social world in a intuitive and beneficial way. However, this same dynamic can present a challenge to the design of robot identity. Specifically, when designing for robot interactions in the shared world, there are a series of ethical considerations that must be accounted for in order to ensure robot identity does not cause harm. For instance, while there may be reasonable justifications for designing robot identity to be adaptable to humans and in particular human identities, there have been ethical concerns about how human identity would be accounted for as well as how robots may demonstrate human identity traits and potentially enforce harmful biases. As such, this workshop aims to create a space in which we can further explore these mentioned applications, questions, and considerations of the adaptability of robot identity towards potentially creating more personalized and inclusive robot interactions in the shared world.

Papers

We accept short papers of 2,000-3,000 words of content (roughly 2-3 pages in the sigconf style excluding references). Submissions should also include short author biographies of 1-2 sentences (not counted as part of the word count).

Papers may address any of the questions and themes above, may be exploratory or of a philosophical nature, or may be reflective writing on authors’ past works that relate to identity. 

Accepted papers will be published at the workshop proceedings. 

All submissions should use the sigconf style. The ACM template is available on Overleaf (simply change the documentclass to be \documentclass[sigconf,screen]{acmart}).

Submissions shall be single blind. That is, they do not need to be anonymized.

Submission

Submit your paper by the deadline (check Important Dates) in hriroboidentity@gmail.com.

Reviewing

All submissions will be reviewed.