Dear colleagues,
The 3rd AAAI Fall Symposium on Unifying Representations for Robot Application Development (UR-RAD) will take place November 6-8, 2025, in Arlington, VA!
In a recent and exciting development, UR-RAD has partnered with the Quori social robot community! Select UR-RAD contributions relevant to the Quori community will be eligible for sponsored participation support to attend UR-RAD 2025! Please see the bottom of this CFP for more information.
Note that ALL submissions, regardless of whether the authors request Quori participation support, will be subject to the same quality and review standards, submission dates, and submission types. Papers that have already been submitted are also eligible for participation support if the necessary requirements are met.
========================= General Symposium Information =========================
Capturing a desired task or interaction as a computational artifact (i.e., a representation) has long played a pivotal role in robotics. Many robotic subfields have traditionally employed a variety of different representational techniques, such as LTL, planning languages, social representations, natural language, and many more. These representations, however, lack cohesion in when and how they are applied. The 3rd Symposium on Unifying Representations for Robot Application Development (UR-RAD) therefore aims to increase interaction between junior and senior researchers, support in-progress research, and cultivate collaboration.
Symposium Website: ur-rad.github.iohttp://ur-rad.github.io AAAI Fall Symposium Series Website: https://aaai.org/conference/fall-symposia/fss25/
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Representational trends - Representations for robot learning - AI planning for robotics - Formal methods in robotics - Natural language as a representation - Novel representations & novel representation uses - Representations for user interfaces - Robot end-user development - Robot programming interfaces & paradigms - Robot runtime/control environments - Opportunities for standardization - Frameworks (e.g., ROS or middleware) - Open-source & collaboration initiatives - Identifying representation requirements
==================== UR-RAD Important Dates ==================== "Preferred" round, with earlier feedback and the option to be included in the AAAI proceedings:
* Submission deadline: August 7th (hard deadline) * Camera Ready Deadline: August 29th (hard deadline)
"Late" round, without the option to archive in the AAAI proceedings:
* 100-200 word abstract submission encouraged by: August 7th * Submission deadline: August 22nd * Camera Ready Deadline: September 5th
Regardless of archival plans, authors are encouraged to submit earlier rather than later. All papers submitted by August 7th, regardless of archival plans, will receive preference if a large number of submissions are received.
==================== UR-RAD Submission Information ====================
We invite the following contributions, formatted using the AAAI-25 author kithttps://aaai.org/authorkit25/:
* Full Papers (4-8 pages, archival OR non-archival): for novel research, artifact submissions, or strong works in progress. * Short Papers (2-4 pages, archival OR non-archival): for positions, smaller artifacts, and early work in progress. * Abstracts (1 page, non-archival only): for sharing ideas.
To encourage interaction between junior and senior researchers, each paper accepted to UR-RAD 2025 (regardless of archival status or contribution type) has the option to be paired with an expert in the field, as a “mentor”. Paper authors who opt in will have the opportunity for extensive interaction with mentors, who will guide discussions about individual papers.
Accepted papers will be presented in-person only (though participants who are not presenting may attend remotely).
===================================== Securing Quori-Related Participation Support ===================================== Quori (https://quori.org) is an NSF-funded, not-for-profit open-source, modular, social robot platform for the human-robot interaction (HRI) research community. A concept video of the latest draft of the robot platform can be found here: https://youtu.be/5ccrm4U4AvA
Quori-related submissions are eligible to be considered for participation support. In addition to adhering to the submission requirements outlined above, Quori-related submissions should be clearly relevant to one or more of the topics below and must include at least one section that details the technical applicability of the contribution to open-source social robot platforms, including, but not limited to, Quori. If interested and relevant, please email us at u*************m@gmail.commailto:u*************m@gmail.com after the paper is submitted, simply stating that you would like for your contribution (paper title and ID) to be considered for Quori participation support.
Many of UR-RAD’s topics of interest are deeply aligned with those of the Quori community. This includes social behavior representations, multi-layered authoring architectures, end-user programming tools, and more. Specifically, the Quori community is interested in topics and representations of speech-based behaviors including linguistics (speech recognition, text-to-speech, syntax of language, etc.) and vocalics (volume, pitch, rate, etc.), as well as body language-based behaviors, including proxemics (social spacing), haptics (touch), oculesics (eye gaze), kinesics (face, hand, and body gestures), deixis (spatial referencing), and chronemics (turn-taking and back-channeling). Thinking critically about these representations is essential to shaping Quori and the next generation of social robot platforms.
We welcome paper submissions (long, short, or abstract-only) on Quori-relevant topics including, but not limited to:
* Novel representations for social behavior: How might human-robot interactions be represented in a standardized way across open robot platforms, such as Quori? * Surveys or reflective analyses: What trends or insights from past social robotics work (including the social behaviors listed above) might shape the design of hardware, software, aesthetic, character, behaviors, etc.? * Standardized representations: What formalizations could support reusability and generalization between deployments of different models of social robots? * Stakeholders: Who are the intended users and developers of social robots like Quori, and how do their needs shape design of representations for application development? * End-user development and learning: In the advent of technology like large language models (LLMs) and foundation models, what robot behaviors should be manually authored vs. autonomously learned? What are the implications of these decisions for how various types of users and developers interact with them? * Physical form factor: How does a robot's physical embodiment shape or constrain underlying representations? * Software infrastructure: What existing and novel software systems can support robots (such as Quori) for autonomous or teleoperated human-robot interactions?
Please note that all papers are subject to the same quality and review standards, whether or not the authors seek Quori participation support.
=================== Organizing Committee ===================
* Ruchen Wen (Co-Chair, Colgate University) * David Porfirio (Co-Chair, Naval Research Laboratory) * Saad Elbeleidy (Peerbots) * Laura M. Hiatt (Naval Research Laboratory) * Ross Mead (Semio) * Andrew Schoen (Semio) * Willie Wilson (Franklin & Marshall College) * Laura Stegner (George Washington University)
Contact u*************m@gmail.com for any questions!