26th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, RO-MAN 2017 http://www.ro-man2017.org/, will be held in Lisbon, Portugal, from 28 to 31 of August 2017.

We are organizing a special session on *Intention in Social Robotics http://www.ro-man2017.org/site/node/12. * The *submission* *due date is March 26*.

If you would like to submit a paper to our special the session, please use the code (588fb) in the paper submission system. Submission instructions are available at the main RO-MAN conference website http://www.ro-man2017.org/.

Imagine an intelligent robot with social skills that was fun to work with and that could help you achieve tasks efficiently, i.e. a social robot. Social robots are a disruptive technology, poised to have a profound impact on business, society and the global economy.

This exciting RO-MAN Special Session on Intention in Social Robotics http://www.ro-man2017.org/site/node/12 will focus on predicting and exploiting Intention in Social Robotics. A self-driving vehicle is a social robot, not only does it need to drive on the road safely but it must communicate with and anticipate the behaviour of nearby cars and people; a delivery robot has to anticipate the behaviour of people in workplaces.

Understanding human intention is critical to anticipating human behaviour. The critical research question is how can we design social robots able to understand human intention and anticipate human motion and desires. Conversely, the question of how robots can indicate intention to help humans is also important.

The purpose of this special session is to explore how social robots can understand and predict people's intention without requiring humans to explicitly indicate or express what they are trying to do or about to do next.

Relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

● Human-robot interaction and collaboration

● Human and/or Robot attention and intention

● Natural low cognitive load methods for signaling intention

● Privacy and security

● Legal and ethical implications of social robots

The goal of special sessions at RO-MAN is to provide a forum for oral presentations that are highly specialized in some particular theme, focused on new topics or innovative applications of established approaches. A special session consists of four to six papers, which, addresses a particular theme or consist of work done in some particular international project.

Best wishes,

*Tony Cohn* (Leeds University) *William Judge* (Commonwealth Bank of Australia) *Reid Simmons* (Carnegie Mellon University) *Mary-Anne Williams* (University of Technology Sydney)

*Professor Mary-Anne Williams http://mary-annewilliams.com* *Director, Disruptive Innovation* University of Technology Sydney (UTS) Founder and Director, Innovation and Enterprise Research Lab http://themagiclab.org/ (The Magic Lab) Fellow, Stanford University https://law.stanford.edu/directory/mary-anne-williams/ Twitter: @SwizzleFish https://twitter.com/swizzlefish