19 Mar
2026
19 Mar
'26
2:55 p.m.
Dear Colleagues,
It is our pleasure to invite you to the Special Session on *Empowering Society through Personalised Multimodal HRI* which it will be held at the 28th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI), in the beautiful Naples (Italy) on 5-9 October 2026.
You can find the full CFP below, but you can also find more information on https://icmi.acm.org/2026/special-sessions/ and please do not hesitate to contact us.
Best regards Alessandra Rossi
--
Alessandra Rossi, PhD
Assistant Professor
Fellow of the Higher Education Academy
Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technologies -
D.I.E.T.I.
University of Naples Federico II
Via Claudio, 21, 80125 - Naples, Italy
w-page: https://alessandrarossi.net
e-mail address: a**************i@unina.it
e-mail address: a*****i@herts.ac.uk
X: @alhandra81
SPECIAL SESSION
on
Empowering Society through Personalised Multimodal HRI
28th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction
5-9 October 2026, Naples, Italy
ICMI website
https://icmi.acm.org/2026/
Submission Guidelines
https://icmi.acm.org/2026/guidelines/
Submission deadline
April 20th, 2026
Paper notification
July 1st, 2026
The vision of personal robots capable of supporting, cooperating with, and
living among humans holds immense potential for societal good. To realise
this vision, robots must move beyond one-size-fits-all interactions and
autonomously tailor their behaviour to the unique characteristics of
individuals, including their culture, preferences, and cognitive and
physical abilities. Personalisation can significantly enhance human-robot
interactions in various real-world scenarios by increasing engagement
through tailored content, building trust and rapport, improving adherence
to the interaction, and enhancing task performance, thus configuring such a
technology as a viable tool for promoting equity and access in domains like
healthcare, education, and assisted living.
As multimodal systems, robots integrate multiple channels of communication
and perception to interact with humans and their environment effectively.
For instance, a robot equipped with speech recognition capabilities can
understand verbal commands and engage in spoken dialogue with users. At the
same time, its vision system allows it to perceive facial expressions,
gestures, and other visual cues, providing additional context for
interpreting the user’s intent and emotional state. Moreover, tactile
sensors enable the robot to sense touch and physical interactions,
enhancing its ability to respond appropriately to human gestures and
contact. By integrating these modalities, the robot can tailor its
behaviour dynamically based on the information it gathers from each channel.
This special session aims at exploring how robots can interact meaningfully
across diverse contexts by going beyond speech and vision processing. It
will collect works that explore the need for robots to be culturally and
context-aware—capable of understanding not only what people said, but how
it is expressed, considering differences and similarities in the richness
and expressiveness of communication styles, and what those expressions mean
within specific cultural frameworks. This session also focuses on
personalisable intelligent agents that are able to adapt not only to
individuals, but to the communities and traditions that shape them.
Finally, with this special session, we want to promote a design of
empowering robotic technologies, developed with and for the people they
support, in order to foster inclusivity, embrace diversity, and generate
long-term social benefits.
To this extent, this special session welcomes research works from a
multidisciplinary group of researchers, including, but not limited to,
psychology, neuroscience, computer science, robotics, and sociology, to
share and discuss current approaches to empowering social assistive robots
with adaptive and learning capabilities in order to foster research and
development of robotic solutions specifically designed for meeting the
individual’s unique needs.
Topics include, but are not limited to:
-
Personalisation in short and long-term HRI
-
User modelling in HRI
-
Personalisation for inclusion
-
Robot’s personality
-
Socially-aware personalization
-
Context and situation awareness for robots
-
Engagement evaluation and re-engagement strategies
-
Personalised dialogue with robots
-
Personalised non-verbal behaviour with robots
-
Adaptive human-aware task planning
-
Theory of Mind for adaptive interaction
-
Machine Learning for robotic personalization
-
Lifelong (continual) learning for adaptation
-
Adaptation in multimodal interaction
-
Affective and emotion-adapted HRI
-
Persuasion in HRI
-
Personalisation for Sustainability
-
Culture-aware robots
-
Evaluation metrics for adaptive robotic behaviour
-
Ethical implications of personalization
-
Robot customisation and teaching
Contact
All questions about submissions should be emailed one of the organisers:
Antonio Andriella, Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial, Spain,
a********a@iri.upc.edu
Wing-Yue Geoffrey Louie, Oakland University, USA, l***e@oakland.edu
Alessandra Rossi, University of Naples Federico II, Italy,
a**************i@unina.it
Silvia Rossi, University of Naples Federico II, Italy, s**********i@unina.it