Following the success of the first edition of Robo-Identity, the second edition will provide an opportunity to expand the discussion about artificial identity. This year, we are focusing on emotions that are expressed through speech and voice. Synthetic voices of robots can resemble and are becoming indistinguishable from expressive human voices. This can be an opportunity and a constraint in expressing emotional speech that can (falsely) convey a human-like identity that can mislead people, leading to ethical issues. How should we envision an agent’s artificial identity? In what ways should we have robots that maintain a machine-like stance, e.g., through robotic speech, and should emotional expressions that are increasingly humanlike be seen as design opportunities? These are not mutually exclusive concerns. As this discussion needs to be conducted in a multi-disciplinary manner, we welcome perspectives on challenges and opportunities from fields of ethics, design, and engineering. For this year’s edition, the special theme will be “speech, emotion and artificial identity”. Authors are invited to submit their papers as Extended Abstracts with short bios (2 to 3 pages). Papers can be of exploratory or philosophical nature, as well as reflective writing on authors' past works that relates to identity and emotion.
Who is a robot? There are a burgeoning number of “bodies”, from standard humanoid robots, e.g., Nao (SoftBank Robotics), to more creative renditions, e.g., a synchronized trio of robots as one or a more abstract Jibo. Yet thus far, who resides in these artificial bodies and to what extent their identities can fluidly travel across different technologies remains a fascinating but under-explored research area. In 2021, the first edition of robo-identity successfully took place by bringing around 50 researchers together to discuss 13 presented papers with 2 renowned HRI invited keynote speakers. The diversity of areas covered by the participants of this workshop initiated an exciting exchange about robo-identity. Strengthened by the success of the first edition, we propose a new edition of Robo-Identity to expand these exchanges. For this edition, we also propose a special theme which is “speech, emotions and artificial identity”.
Consequently, for the second edition of Robo-Identity we will address the following questions:
• Philosophy - What is artificial identity?
• Affect - How are artificial identities delivered via emotional expression of agents?
• Design - How do an agent’s voice and speech convey emotions in constructing its artificial identity?
We accept short papers of 2-3 pages (excluding references). Papers can be of exploratory or philosophical nature, as well as reflective writing on authors’ past works that relate to identity. ACM template link on Overleaf here.
Accepted papers will be published at the workshop proceedings. All submissions should use the default "sigconf" style. Submissions should be single blind, i.e. do not need to be anonymized.
Submit your paper by the deadline (check Important Dates) in roboidentityhri@gmail.com.
All submissions will be reviewed by 2 reviewers.