International Journal of Social Robotics - Call for Papers: Special Issue on Social and Cognitive Interactions in the Open World
Guest Editors: Yiming Wang, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy Cigdem Beyan, University of Trento, Italy Fei Chen, Chinese University of Hong Kong Séverin Lemaignan Elisa Ricci, University of Trento, Italy Alessandra Sciutti, Italian Institute of Technology
Submission deadline: June 30, 2024
Description Social robots are often designed to serve and support human’s needs in the human environment. Therefore, the fundamental capability of social robots is to be able to perceive the dynamic interaction environments with multi-modal sensory inputs and extract the underneath abstract knowledge, so that the robots can reason on top of such knowledge to plan physical interactions with the environments, via grasping, navigation, speech, postures, etc. that are both legible and socially-acceptable to humans.
Importantly, perceiving and understanding the interaction environments includes not only modeling the surrounding environments but also analyzing the basic principles of human verbal and nonverbal communication. Particularly, nonverbal signals, e.g., gaze, facial expressions, gestures, vocal behavior, can carry significant information regarding the status of the human interactors including their emotions, engagement, intentions, action goals and focus of attention, as well as personal traits over the long-term. Such rich nonverbal information in company with explicit verbal expressions completes the human feedback to the social robots, and helps them to learn and adapt towards a more natural decision making and action planning.
However, building up such perception and cognition capability from verbal and non-verbal inputs still faces great challenges in the open world due to the large diversity and the evolving nature of the real-world interaction environment. Encountering the unknowns, i.e. the knowledge that is outside what the robot has learnt, can easily fail the robot from proper functioning. Yet, the day-by-day richer resources in terms of data and computational resource, and advances in deep learning methods, such as self-supervised learning, active learning, continual learning, large foundation models, etc., do signal a promising future for the development of social robots that are able to address open-world challenges and evolve its cognition capability adaptively.
This special issue is dedicated to developing computational tools to advance the robot cognition capability for social and natural human-robot interaction in the open-world. We are calling for innovative research ideas, cutting-edge computational methods and models related to social robot cognition, as well as new simulation tools, datasets, benchmarks and evaluation protocols. We also welcome research that focuses on the decision making and the physical interactions that foster novel methods or closely couple with the understanding of cognitive interactions between robots and their interaction environments under the open-world challenges.
The topics addressed in the special issue are listed below:
● Novel deep learning/machine learning methods for social robots with open-world challenges ● Transfer learning, meta-learning and continual/lifelong learning for social robots ● Self-supervised learning and foundation models for robotic perception ● Interactive/active learning for social robots ● Recognition of individual’s and/or social group’s activity ● (Real-time) recognition of human social signals, e.g., emotion, gaze, gesture, vocal activity, etc. ● Inference of human intentions for social robots ● Social cognition (joint attention, spatial perspective taking, action prediction, theory of mind) in human-robot interaction ● Human-robot engagement prediction ● Multimodal fusion for social robots ● Applications of human-robot interactions (e.g. for heath, education, entertainment, business) ● Ambient assisted living ● Social acceptance of robots based on human nonverbal behavioral cues (e.g., eye gaze, facial expressions, group formations) ● Human-robot interaction styles ● Reinforcement learning and learning from demonstration for social robot human/environment interactions ● Novel methods for navigation in social interaction scenarios
We invite the extension of the posters (https://sciar-workshop.github.io/presentations) that have been presented during our Workshop on Social and Cognitive Interactions for Assistive Robotics (SCIAR), held in conjunction with the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2022, to the submission of the proposed special issue. Note that the poster presentations were not included and published in any previous proceedings. In addition, we welcome the submissions of any novel and unpublished works that fit into our scope.
The special issue is created as submission questionnaire in the system. When you submit your paper you will be asked if your paper belongs to a special issue. Please answer yes, and then select “Social and Cognitive Interactions in the Open World” from the pull-down menu.
All submitted papers will be reviewed on a peer review basis as soon as they are received. Accepted papers will become immediately available Online First until the complete Special Issue appears.
Guest Editor Biographies Dr. Yiming Wang (PhD, Queen Mary University of London) is a researcher in the Deep Visual Learning (DVL) unit in Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK), working on privacy-preserving scene dynamics analysis under a couple of EU Projects. She has expertise on vision-based scene understanding that facilitates physical robotic interaction for social good, covering diverse topics on static scene modeling, semantic scene understanding and scene dynamic analysis. She obtained the PhD in Electronic Engineering in 2018 from Queen Mary University of London (UK), working on vision-based multi-agent navigation with collision avoidance. Since 2018, she worked as a post-doc researcher in the Pattern Analysis and Computer Vision/Visual Geometry Modeling (PAVIS/VGM research line at Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT), leading topics related to active 3D vision for scene exploration, object recognition, and object search through both research and industrial projects. She has served as a reviewer in many top-tier robotic/vision conferences including ICRA, IROS, BMVC (outstanding reviewer 2021), CVPR, ECCV, ICCV and journals including TRO, RAL, IJCV, CVIU. She has co-organized the workshop "Social and Cognitive Interactions for Assistive Robotics (SCIAR)” in IROS 2022 (this opens in a new tab). She was also the lead organizer for the special session "Edge-Fog-Cloud machine learning for smart cities applications" in EUSIPCO 2022 (this opens in a new tab). CV and further details are available here (this opens in a new tab).
Dr. Cigdem Beyan (PhD, University of Edinburgh) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science (DISI) at the University of Trento. She has co-authored over 50 papers published in refereed journals and international conferences. Her research interests fall into the social and affective computing domains, specifically nonverbal human-human and human-robot interaction analysis. She has been involved in the Technical Committee of several international conferences (e.g., ACM Multimedia, CVPR, ICML, ECCV, BMVC, ICLR, ACM ICMI) as a reviewer and area chair as well as being a reviewer in several international journals (e.g., IEEE Trans. PAMI, IEEE Trans. on Cognitive and Developmental Systems, IEEE Trans. Multimedia, IEEE Trans. Affective Computing, Pattern Recognition). She has been a guest editor in Frontiers in Robotics and AI for the research topic: “Computational Approaches for Human-Human and Human-Robot Social Interactions”. She motivated, developed and edited the aforementioned special issue. She was also involved in organizing a workshop series “Applications of Egocentric Vision (EgoApp)”, which were held together with The British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC) 2019 (this opens in a new tab) and International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR) 2020 (virtual (this opens in a new tab)). Particularly, EgoApp2020 focuses on the approaches for analysis of images and videos acquired from the point of view of a “robot”. She was also the main organizer of “Social and Cognitive Interactions for Assistive Robotics Workshop” in IROS 2022 (this opens in a new tab). Since 2018, she has been handling computer vision and machine learning manuscripts submitted to ICES Marine Science Journal as an Associate Editor. She is also involved in “Socially Pertinent Robots in Gerontological Healthcare” Project financed by EU Horizon 2020 (GA #871245). She is a member of ELLIS. CV and further details are available here (this opens in a new tab).
Prof. Fei Chen is an assistant professor with the Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). He is currently the head of Collaborative and Versatile Robots Laboratory with CUHK T-Stone Robotics Institute. Before joining CUHK, he has been leading the Active Perception and Robot Interactive Learning laboratory and several EU and domestic projects on robot interaction and manipulation at Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia. He is also the co-chair of IEEE RAS TC on Neuro-robotics Systems. He has been working as the board member for several international conferences, such as HFR, ICARM, IEEE-Cyber, Robio, as leading organizer of workshops on robot manipulation at ICRA, IROS. He is also the GE for several special issues under prestigious robotics journals. He is the associate editor for journal Frontiers in Neurorobotics and IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems. He is an IEEE Senior Member. CV and further details are available here (this opens in a new tab).
Dr. Séverin Lemaignan is a recognised expert in Cognitive and Social Robotics, with more than 70 publications on that topic. He has led numerous related workshops and co-organised several international conferences. For instance, he has been Associate Editor in several major robotics conferences (HRI from 2015 to 2020; IROS in 2016, 20217, 2018, 2021; RSS in 2020 and 2021; IJCAI 2018; AAMAS 2019; ICMI 2020). Dr. Lemaignan has been co-organiser of several workshops on related topics (for instance, the workshop on Cognitive Architectures for Social Robotics at HRI 2016 or workshop on Human-Robot Engagement at IJCAI2017), as well as co-organiser of the HRI conference in 2020 (local chair), 2021 (Student competition chair), 2022 (Late Breaking Report chair). He has been recently organizing a new HRI European meet-up with 60+ participants over two days. He currently is Associate Editor of Frontiers In Robotics and AI, member of the HRI Steering Committee. CV and further details are available here (this opens in a new tab).
Prof. Elisa Ricci (PhD, University of Perugia 2008) is an Associate Professor with the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science (DISI) at the University of Trento since 2017 and the head of the Deep Visual Learning research group at Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK) since 2019. She has published over 160 papers on international venues (7463 cit., h-index 44). Her research interests are mainly in the areas of domain adaptation and continual learning for computer vision and robotics application. She received the ACM Multimedia 2015 best paper award and the Best Honorable Awards at ICCV 2021. She is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, Computer Vision and Image Understanding and Pattern Recognition. She is/was the Program Chair of ACM Multimedia 2020 and the Diversity Chair of ACM Multimedia 2022. She is an ELLIS Fellow. She organized several workshops and tutorials, e.g. at CVPR 2021, ICCV 2019, ECCV 2018. She is the leader of the work package addressing the automatic perception of the human-social robot interactions in “Socially Pertinent Robots in Gerontological Healthcare” Project financed by EU Horizon 2020 (GA #871245). CV and further details are available here (this opens in a new tab).
Dr. Alessandra Sciutti is the head of the CONTACT (COgNiTive Architecture for Collaborative Technologies) Unit of the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT). After a master’s degree in Bioengineering from the University of Genova and a Ph.D. in Humanoid Technologies, she spent two research periods abroad, first at the Robotics Lab of the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (USA) and then at the Emergent Robotics Laboratory of Osaka University (Japan). In 2018 she was awarded an ERC Starting Grant, for the project wHiSPER (www.whisperproject.eu), focused on the investigation of shared perception between humans and robots. She published more than 100 papers in international journals and conferences and is currently Associate Editor for several journals on Cognitive Robotics and Human-Robot Interaction. She is the corresponding co-chair of the Technical Committee on Cognitive Robotics of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society and a Scholar of the ELLIS Society. Sciutti received many awards, such as the title “Tecnovisionarie” (2021) and a recognition by Fortune Italy (2022) for her research in Robotics and AI. The scientific aim of her research is to investigate the sensory, motor, and cognitive mechanisms underlying human social interaction, with the technological goal of developing robots able to establish mutual understanding with humans.
