Call for Contributions

The Social Robots in Therapy and Care workshop series aims at advancing research topics related to the use of robots in the contexts of Social Care and Robot-Assisted Therapy (RAT). Robots in social care and therapy have been a long time promise in HRI as they have the opportunity to improve patients life significantly. Multiple challenges have to be addressed for this, such as building platforms that work in proximity with patients, therapists and health-care professionals; understanding user needs; developing adaptive and autonomous robot interactions; and addressing ethical questions regarding the use of robots with a vulnerable population.

This workshop will be focused on the importance of equipping social robots with socio-emotional intelligence and the ability to perform meaningful and personalized interactions. This workshop aims to bring together researchers and industry experts in the fields of Human-Robot Interaction, Machine Learning and Robots in Health and Social Care. It will be an opportunity for all to share and discuss ideas, strategies and findings to guide the design and development of robot-assisted systems for therapy and social care implementations that can provide personalize, natural, engaging and autonomous interactions with patients (and health-care providers).

Students of all levels pursuing research in a field related to Human-Robot interaction should consider applying.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Social intelligence for robots in therapy and care.
• Adaptive mechanisms for robot used in therapy and care.
• Personalize and persistent HRI in therapy and care.
• Affect and engagement in therapy and care HRI.
• Trust and collaboration in therapy and care HRI.
• Modeling patients, therapist, and robots relationships.
• Shared or full autonomy in robots in therapy and care.
• User and patient-centered HRI studies.
• Long-term therapeutic interaction studies.
• Acceptance studies on social robots used in therapy.
• Clinical validation of robot-assisted therapies.
• Ethical challenges for social care robots.

Workshop candidates are requested to send a 2-4 pages abstract before January 30th about a research related to the topics described above using EasyChair.

We aim to collect an extended version of a selection of the workshop papers to be published in a special issue.

Submission Guide

Workshop candidates are requested to send a 2-4 pages abstract before January 30th about a research related to the topics of the workshop using EasyChair.

In particular, the abstract should cover:

• a main research question or motivation of the work,
• background and related work,
• the research approach,
• results (if any), and a description of future work.

We explicitly encourage the submission of papers describing work in progress, or containing preliminary results to discuss with the community.

All manuscripts must be submitted in PDF format (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=srec2019), and will be peer-reviewed based on relevance to the workshop. A template can be found at IEEE format, Overleaf format.

Contact: srec2019@easychair.org