32nd IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, IEEE RO-MAN 2023

The importance of personalisation in Human-Robot Interaction has already shown its advantages in multiple scenarios and will become a prevalent direction for the field.

Personalisation has the potential to significantly improve short- and long-term interactions in a variety of real-world scenarios by fostering trust and rapport, increasing adherence to the interaction, increasing engagement through tailored content, and improving task performance.

As a result, deploying robots capable of doing so requires the manufacturers to model reasoning and perceptual capabilities.

However, we need to ponder whether and to what extent personalisation can benefit the interactions, and ultimately the users. Indeed, cultural biases, gender and age stereotypes might be amplified by robots that are developed as end-to-end systems for conducting social interactions. It is therefore of utmost importance to discuss contexts and environments in which personalisation is desired or required for the field and those in which it should be avoided. The contrast occurs between data-driven vs knowledge-driven approaches, in which the first can empower robots with personalisation skills while the latter can be better suited for explaining the decision process of the robot's behaviour.

The workshop focuses on the benefits and drawbacks of personalisation and behavioural adaptation in social HRI.

In particular, this workshop aims at bringing together a multidisciplinary group of researchers from areas including, but not limited to, psychology, neuroscience, computer science, robotics, and sociology, to share and discuss current approaches to empowering social assistive robots with adaptive and learning capabilities in order to foster research and development of robotic solutions specifically designed for meeting the individual's unique needs.