SSA - 2024

We invite you to submit papers (full papers & work in progress) to the 3rd Symbiotic Society with Avatars (SSA) workshop. The SSA workshop will take place during the 2024 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI’24) in Boulder, Colorado, USA. The SSA workshop is held on 15th of March and it is a half-day workshop.

Important Dates

When: Afternoon on March 15, 2024

Where: Royal Arch in Hilton Garden Inn Boulder, Colorado, USA

UMC 384, University of Colorado Boulder, Colorado, USA

Submission deadline: February 9, 2024 (AoE) ** EXTENDED **

Notifications: February 14, 2024

Overview

Avatar robots, representations of remote people, help them extend their physical, cognitive, and perceptual capabilities. These avatars can be a range of embodiments from virtual agents to physical robots. With avatar robots, a person (operator) can coexist in multiple locations (beyond space) by controlling multiple avatars simultaneously and move from one place to another without delays (beyond time) by connecting to another avatar in a different location. In the near future, avatar technology would change people’s lives dramatically. However, we face various challenges to reach this future, including uncharted knowledge of social interactions between people and avatar robots, missing standardization on developing robots (robot specs and controls), the lack of related laws and ethical rules, and technical difficulties. With this developing area of human-robot interaction, new key challenges and problems, approaches, and data are rapidly emerging. This workshop would act as a key meeting point to focus this effort and discuss avatar robots and related research and form new collaborations to forge ahead toward symbiotic society with avatars.

Keynote Speakers

Daniel J. Szafir

Dylan F. Glas

Topics

We encourage researchers to submit their papers and work-in-progress related to Avatars to the workshop. The topics are as follows (but not limited to these areas):

Avatars interactions (avatar-human, operator-avatar, and avatar-avatar interaction)
Teleoperation
Social agents / virtual agents
Telepresence robots
Multimodal interaction
Avatar ethics
Robot/Avatar deployments in the wild
Avatar design
Avatars in virtual and mixed reality
Open source tools for avatar development

SSA aims to bring together Human-Robot Interaction researchers who are actively working in the areas of teleoperation, social robotics, virtual agents, etc.

Instructions for Submission

All papers submitting to this workshop must be submitted in PDF format. We are following the general ACM SIG format (“sigconf”, double column format). Templates are available at the following links: ACM link and Overleaf link.

The submission can be in any length, but we encourage to keep them within 6 pages + references for research paper or 2 pages + references for work-in-progress paper. The authors of accepted papers will be asked to present their work in the workshop. Please submit your paper by sending the document to this address (hri24ssa@robot.soc.i.kyoto-u.ac.jp).