From Modelling to Understanding Children's Behaviour in the Context of Robotics and Social Artificial Intelligence
In conjunction with
the 14th International Conference on Social Robotics
16 December 2022, Florence, Italy (Hybrid) 09:00 - 17:00 CET
About the Workshop
Understanding and modelling children’s cognitive processes and their behaviour in the context of their interaction with robots and social artificial intelligence systems is a fundamental prerequisite for meaningful and effective robot interventions. However, children’s development involve complex faculties such as exploration, creativity and curiosity which are challenging to model. Also, often children express themselves in a playful way which is different from a typical adult behaviour. Different children also have different needs, and it remains a challenge in the current state of the art that those of neurodiverse children are under-addressed. With this workshop, we aim to promote a common ground among different disciplines such as developmental sciences, artificial intelligence and social robotics and discuss cutting-edge research in the area of user modelling and adaptive systems for children.
Motivational questions
As a starting point for this workshop, we will use the following questions:
What makes applications for children particular within the broader context of HRI and human-AI interaction? Relevant considerations can, for example, be technical, theoretical, or ethical in nature.
What kind of methods can help us evaluate, model and understand children's behaviour in the context of social AI and Robotics?
How can applications for children be deployed safely and constructively?
The workshop addresses a broad range of research from fields including Social Robotics, HRI, HCI, Design, Developmental Robotics and neighboring disciplines that works with neurotypical and neurodiverse children.
Topics include but are non limited to the following:
Evaluation methods founded on cognitive, developmental or comparative psychology
User modelling
Artificial Intelligence in HRI
Adaptive robots for children
Participatory design
Child-robot interaction
Child speech recognition
Eye-tracking techniques
Children’s perspectives about robots
Ethical considerations
Privacy and data minimization
The workshop proposal with more details about the motivation for this workshop can be found here
Call for Participation
We welcome submissions on any topic within the scope of the workshop. We welcome two types of submissions:
Submission of 3-4 pages papers that describe preliminary results or work in progress relevant to the workshop is encouraged.
Submissions for participation in the form of 1-page statement about your current work and how it helps to our understanding of child's behaviour.
Authors can submit the complete manuscripts in PDF format following Springer’s author’s guidelines either for LaTex or Word for the preparation of their manuscripts. Springer’s proceedings LaTeX templates are also available in Overleaf.
Important dates
General deadline Paper Submission: November 28, 2022
General Acceptance Notification: December 3, 2022
Camera Ready Paper: December 13, 2022
Invited Speakers
Mohamed Chetouani
Professor, ISIR-UPMC, CNRS, Sorbonne Université, France
Toshie Takahashi
Professor, School of Culture, Media and Society, Waseda University, Japan
Agnieszka Wykowska
Principal Investigator ItalianInstitute of Technology, Italy
Thomas Weisswange
Principal Scientist, HONDA Research Institute EU, Germany
Lightning talks by educators
Tiija Rinta, Educator and Researcher, University College London, UK
Tomoko Imai, Educator and Researcher, Jiyugaoka Gakuen High School, Tokyo, Japan
Chris Zotos, Educator and Researcher, Arsakeio High School of Patras, Greece
Program
9:00 Welcome by the organizers
9:15 Invited talk: Agnieszka Wykowska
10:00 Invited talk: Mohamed Chetouani
10:45 Coffee Break
11:00 Short papers presentations (part 1)
Ana Lucia Urrea Echeverria: Robot-Assisted Intervention for Word Learning in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders: Study Design
Ameer Helmi: GoBot Dance: An Air Dancer-Inspired Robot For Child-Robot Interaction
Ameer Helmi: GoBot Throw: A Toy-Inspired Ball-Launching Robot For Child-Robot Interaction
Francesca Cocchella: Hunt for the Stars: a flexible game tool to study social influence and group dynamics in children-robot interaction
11:30 Lightning talk: Tomoko Imai
11:45 Interactive session
12:30 Lunch break
13:30 Invited talk Thomas Weisswange
14:15 Short papers presentations (part 2)
Marcos L P Bueno: Probabilities, not classifiers: how to build algorithms for child-technology interaction
Alicja Wróbel: Defining children’s mental model of social robots during an interaction led by a robot. A field study.
Leigh Levinson: Dynamical, Multi-Modal Approaches To Children’s Engagement with Robots
Karolina Źróbek: A vegan robot? In-the-wild observations on unexpected events in child-robot interaction.
14:45 Lightning talk by Chris Zotos
15:00 Interactive session
15:45 Invited talk: Toshie Takahashi
16:30 Plenary discussion with the participation of the audience
16:45 Wrap-up
17:00 End of the workshop
18:00 Going for drinks/food together
Accepted Papers
Ana Lucia Urrea, Isabel de Los Reyes Rodríguez Ortiz and David Saldaña Sage: Robot-Assisted Intervention for Word Learning in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders: Study Design.
Ameer Helmi, Lucas Dassonville, Christine Zhan and Naomi Fitter: GoBot Dance: An Air Dancer-Inspired Robot For Child-Robot Interaction.
Ameer Helmi, Tze-Hsuan Wang, Christine Zhan, Kenneth Nys, Pico Sankari, Samuel Logan and Naomi Fitter: GoBot Throw: A Toy-Inspired Ball-Launching Robot For Child-Robot Interaction.
Francesca Cocchella, Giulia Pusceddu, Michela Bogliolo, Linda Lastrico, Giulia Belgiovine, Maura Casadio, Francesco Rea and Alessandra Sciutti: Hunt for the Stars: a flexible game tool to study social influence and group dynamics in children-robot interaction.
Marcos L. P. Bueno and Serge Thill: Probabilities, not classifiers: how to build algorithms for child-technology interaction.
Alicja Wróbel, Karolina Źróbek, Paulina Zguda, Bipin Indurkhya, Marie-Monique Schaper and Artur Gunia: Defining children’s mental model of social robots during an interaction led by a robot. A field study.
Leigh Levinson: Dynamical, Multi-Modal Approaches To Children’s Engagement with Robots.
Karolina Źróbek, Alicja Wróbel, Paulina Zguda, Bipin Indurkhya, Marie-Monique Schaper and Artur Gunia: A vegan robot? In-the-wild observations on unexpected events in child-robot interaction.
Organizers
Serge Thill
Associate Professor
Donders Centre for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University
Ana Paiva
Professor
Instituto Superior Tecnico, Computer Science and Engineering, University of Lisbon
Location
ICSR2022 will be held at Chamber of Commerce in Florence, which is located in the city center. It is just behind Uffizi gallery, and, at a walking distance, there are located the main attractions of Florence, like Ponte Vecchio, the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, Piazza della Signoria, Piazzale Michelangelo, and Boboli garden.
Address: Piazza Mentana 1-2, 50122 Firenze (FI), Italy
Room 3
Zoom link: To be provided upon registration
This workshop is supported in part by the Horizon Europe project EMPOWER
Contact: If you have any comments or questions, please contact us at vasiliki.charisi <at>ec.europa.eu