[Air-L] CFP: The Imperfectly Relatable Robot: An interdisciplinary workshop on the role of failure in HRI

[Katherine Harrison]

***apologies for cross posting****

Call For Papers (and participation):
"The Imperfectly Relatable Robot: An interdisciplinary workshop on the role
of failure in HRI" co-located with HRI 2023.

Website: https://sites.google.com/view/hri-failure-ws/home

What happens when robots fail? How does this impact human expectations of
social robots? What if encountering a robot who is a little less than
perfect might actually make it more relatable?

Focusing on failure as a way to improve human-robot interactions represents
a novel approach that calls into question human expectations of robots, as
well as posing ethical and methodological challenges to researchers. In
this space, interdisciplinary conversations are the key to untangling these
challenges and bringing themes of power and context into view.  We welcome
authors and participants from multiple fields including, but not limited
to, Social Robotics, Human-Robot Interaction, Design, Philosophy,
Psychology, Science & Technology Studies, Media Studies and Gender Studies.

Topics for discussion at this half-day workshop might include:
• Methods for studying failure (both robotic failures, but also ways of
understanding human responses to failure)
• Failures as a way to explore norms around assumed bodies and behaviours
in the human-robot interaction
• Detecting failure – how can a robot know it has failed?
• Different kinds of failures – recognition, proximity, mechanical – and
the impact on the interaction
• Human tolerance for robotic failure – precise measurements for industrial
robots (target radius, for example) as compared to social robots where what
counts as “failure” may be harder to define
• Popular culture representations of robots and user assumptions – the gap
between fiction and reality
• Too good to be true? The uncanny valley, likeability and warts on the
noses of our robots
• Cross-cultural studies on failures exploring how failures might be
sanctioned differently in different cultures
• Affective “scaffolding” performed by other humans: helping us to interact
with failing robots
• The normalization of failure in the robotics community: when does failure
become an issue and when is it just “business as usual”?
• Planning for failure “in the wild”

We welcome anyone who is interested to participate in this workshop. Please
note that we ask all participants to register for the workshop

Abstracts (2-4 pages in length, including references) must be submitted in
PDF format. All submissions must follow the ACM/IEEE HRI template.
Templates are available at this link (US letter).

Papers will be reviewed for their relevance, novelty, and scientific and
technical soundness. Submissions do not need to be anonymized. All accepted
papers will be linked to the workshop website. We require at least one
author to be registered for and attend the workshop for all accepted
papers. Papers should be submitted via Easychair:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=imprr2023

Please feel free to reach out if you have questions to:
failure.ws2023 at gmail.com

Important dates:
Deadline for abstract submission: 31 January 2023
Decisions on abstract acceptance: 14 February 2023
Deadline for accepted authors to upload a 2 minute “teaser” presentation: 6
March 2023
Workshop: 13 March 2023, at HRI ’23, in Stockholm, Sweden.

Organisers:
Katherine Harrison, Linköping University, Sweden
Giulia Perugia, Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands
Kavyaa Somasundaram, Örebro University, Sweden
Filipa Correia, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal
Sanne van Waveren, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
Ana Paiva, GAIPS, INESC-ID, Portugal
Amy Loutfi, Örebro University, Sweden