*BAILAR 2022: The 6th Workshop on Behavior Adaptation, Interaction and Learning for Assistive Robotics*

Royal Continental Hotel and Meeting Centre, Naples, Italy Naples, Italy, August 29, 2022

*Conference website*

https://sites.google.com/view/bailar-2022/home

*Submission link*

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=bailar2022

*Submission deadline*

June 1, 2022

*Topics: **socially assistive robotics https://easychair.org/cfp/topic.cgi?a=28249434;tid=687286 mutual affective understanding https://easychair.org/cfp/topic.cgi?a=28249434;tid=27170020 theory of mind in hri https://easychair.org/cfp/topic.cgi?a=28249434;tid=27243540 internal state monitoring and adaptation https://easychair.org/cfp/topic.cgi?tid=27243533;a=28249434*

*Statement of objectives*

Mutual affective understanding is integral for achieving the so-called Theory of Mind (ToM) allowing successful, acceptable, and intelligent social human-robot interaction (HRI). Corresponding concepts rely on new paradigms of robotic control systems that consider not only the possibility for a robot to interpret humans’ observable behaviors and internal/emotional states with the aim of anticipating and adapting to their subsequent reactions, but also to facilitate humans in the interpretation and anticipation of the robot’s state, intentions, and future actions through legible behavior designed around the emotional dimension of the communication.

In addition to being able to detect and interpret humans' basic affective responses to adapt their behavior accordingly, robots should also be endowed with the ability to show affective and social responses in a legible way for humans to allow acceptability and efficient human-machine communication. This is especially desirable in the field of Socially Assistive Robotics (SAR), where interaction often takes place with disabled or vulnerable people. Especially in this period of worldwide pandemic, an increasing number of hospitals have relied on the assistance of social robots to interact with patients as helping interfaces for remote communication with their families. Moreover, robots can help decrease the workload and physical contact of healthcare specialists, which would be beneficial to overcome the situations where elderly or vulnerable people are at risk of getting infected. The need to ensure the positive feelings and acceptance of people, while providing them with the necessary assistance, has outlined the utility of intelligent and empathic socially assistive robots. In these contexts, it is of paramount importance to consider the effect of verbal and non-verbal emotional social cues of the robot on the affective state of the user with whom it is interacting. On the one hand, a robot can be employed to provide assistance to individuals with disability (e.g., cognitive or physical rehabilitation exercises) with the aim of increasing their health and improving their quality of life. On the other hand, its presence and actions could also potentially trigger negative emotions such as stress or discomfort if not tailored to the individual’s needs and expectations. This may cause serious difficulties by negatively impacting the users' health and, in turn, achieving a counter-productive result. In this context, robots could use the affect-sensing capability to learn and adapt their behavior to be more comfortable for individuals and to achieve a higher degree of learnability and acceptability through inclusive interaction.

This edition of BAILAR Workshop aims at putting the mutual understanding of affective/emotional states of robots and humans at the crossroads with learning and user adaptation within HRI. Methodologies and technologies adopted for detecting and adapting to users’ mental states, emotions and dispositions during HRI will be presented and discussed. Experimental protocols and results could also outline possible effects of gender, age, personality, and pathology on robot perception from an emotional and affective point of view, as well as ethical considerations regarding learning and using personal data within assistive applications.

*Intended audience: *This workshop is intended as a forum for a broad audience, composed of roboticists, psychologists, computer scientists, social and ethics scientists, aiming at discussing the role of adaptation, learning, emotional communication, and mutual affective understanding in HRI for assistive real-world applications, and their potential impact on users’ acceptance, especially in terms of usability, efficiency, empathy, and their emotional responses.

*List of topics: *Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

- Online adaptive behavior - Acceptability and personalization in HRI - User and behavior modeling for adaptation - Emotion and intention recognition - Multimodal interfaces for emotion recognition - Affective and emotional robots - Empathy in robotics - Mutual affective communication - Affective computing in SAR - Internal state monitoring - Detection of verbal and non-verbal behavioral cues - Lifelong (or continual) learning methods in HRI - Short-term personalization in HRI - Incremental and online learning in HRI - Robot behavior explainability - Theory of mind in Robotics - Understandable Communication - Ethical Aspects of Affective HRI communication and personalization in SAR - Evaluation metrics for adaptive robot behavior - Cultural and Social Awareness in HRI - Intention Recognition and Commitment - Mixed-Initiative Interaction - Cognitive Robotics

*Important Dates*

- *Deadline for Paper Submission:* June 1st, 2022 - *Paper Acceptance Notification:* June 25th, 2022 - *Camera Ready Paper:* July 20th, 2022 - *Main Conference Date:* August 28th– September 2nd, 2022 - *Workshop Date:* September 2nd, 2022 (To be decided by the ROMAN2022’s PC)

*Invited speakers *

- *Prof. Tom Zimkie*, Linköping University, Sweden (CONFIRMED) - *Prof. Antonio Sgorbissa*, University of Genova, Italy (CONFIRMED) - *Prof. Hatice Gunes*, University of Cambridge, UK (CONFIRMED) - *Prof. Joost Broekens*, University of Leiden, The Netherlands (CONFIRMED)

*Organizing Committee*

*Mariacarla Staffa* (Primary Contact Person) *- *Department of Science and Technologies - University of Naples Parthenope (*m***************a@uniparthenopoe.it m***************a@uniparthenopoe.it*)

*Antonio Andriella* *- *Institut de Robotica i Informatica Industrial (CSIC-UPC), Spain (*a********a@iri.upc.edu a********a@iri.upc.edu*)

*Bahar Irfan - *Evinoks Service Equipment Industry and Commerce Inc., Turkey (*b*********n@evinoks.com b*********n@evinoks.com)*

*Alessandro Umbrico - *National Research Council of Italy, Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies (CNR-ISTC), Italy* (**a****************o@istc.cnr.it a****************o@istc.cnr.it)*