Dear colleagues,

It is our pleasure to invite you to submit your works at the Workshop on Towards Ethical Deception in HRI that is organised @ the IEEE RO-MAN 2026 conference, held in Kitakyushu, Japan.

We will have two exceptional speakers with very interesting and different views on the topic, and they will spark engaging and endearing conversations: Kaoru Sumi, Future University (Hakodate, Japan) and Robert Sparrow, Monash University (Melbourne, Australia).

Accepted papers will also be invited to submit a paper at the Special Issue based on this workshop at International Journal of Social Robotics (Q1).

You can find the full CFP below, but also on our website https://sites.google.com/view/ted-hri

Do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.

best regards Alessandra

TED_HRI 2026

Towards Ethical Deception in HRI

Kitakyushu International Conference Center, Kitakyushu, Japan

24-28 August 2024

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Workshop website: https://sites.google.com/view/ted-hri -

Submission link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ted-hri26 -

Deadline for paper submission: 26 June 2026

This workshop focuses on the ethical and pro-social use of deceptive and persuasive behaviours in social robotics, exploring how robots deployed in healthcare, educational, caregiving, and domestic environments can strategically employ techniques such as white lies, intentional errors, and selective information omission to improve user well-being and interaction effectiveness. As social robots evolve beyond reactive dialogue systems toward socio-emotionally aware agents capable of addressing users' broader psychological needs, the deliberate and context-sensitive use of deception emerges as a nuanced but potentially valuable behavioural strategy. At the same time, the workshop critically engages with the controversies surrounding robot deception, acknowledging the lack of scholarly consensus on its definition and the ethical boundaries that must govern its application. By bringing together researchers from multiple disciplines, the workshop aims to advance a shared understanding of how robots might ethically leverage deceptive and persuasive mechanisms to improve human well-being without exploiting human vulnerabilities. Submission & List of Topics

The workshop is open to a broad audience from academia and industry researching social robotics, robot ethics, cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy of technology. The workshop aims to attract an interdisciplinary audience that includes academics, industry researchers, designers, and policy-makers interested in exploring the integration of deceptive techniques in designed-centred and ethics-centred HRI. By fostering dialogue across disciplinary and methodological boundaries, the workshop seeks to promote a shared understanding of how social robots might responsibly employ complex behavioural strategies in human-centred contexts, such as education, healthcare and service.

We will invite authors to submit scientific papers ranging from 2 to 6 pages, with additional space for references and appendices. We will accept different types of works, including preliminary findings, case studies, position papers, surveys and cutting-edge research on the workshop topics. Accepted papers will have short oral presentations.

We will encourage authors of the accepted papers to present a video or to demonstrate their work.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

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Pro-social deception. -

Anti-social robot deception. -

Ethical (RoboEthics) implications of deceptive robotics. -

Creating deceptive robots. Mechanisms of deceptive robots. -

Applications of deceptive robots. -

Machine learning and deceptive robots. -

Counter-deception and resilience (both for humans and robots) -

Who decides who can be deceived (and when)? -

Responsible development of robotic deception, including participatory design for the development of appropriate deceptive behaviours -

The deception objection debate: Are emotionally expressive robots deceptive?

Submission Guidelines

Authors should submit their papers formatted according to the IEEE two-column format http://ras.papercept.net/conferences/support/support.php, which is also used for contributions to the main conference. Use the following templates to create the paper and generate or export a PDF file: LaTeX http://ras.papercept.net/conferences/support/tex.php or MS-Word http://ras.papercept.net/conferences/support/word.php.

Authors needs to submit their PDF via EasyChair https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ted-hri26. Each paper will receive at least two reviews. All papers are reviewed using a single-blind review process: authors declare their names and affiliations in the manuscript for the reviewers to see, but reviewers do not know each other's identities, nor do the authors receive information about who has reviewed their manuscript. Committees

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Kantwon Rogers, Massachusetts Inst. of Technology, Massachusetts, USA -

Andres Rosero, George Mason University, Virginia, USA -

Alessandra Rossi, University of Naples Federico II, Napoli, Italy -

Silvia Rossi, University of Naples Federico II, Napoli, Italy -

Henrik Skaug Sætra, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway -

Alan Wagner, Pennsylvania State University, Pennsylvania, USA

ContactAll questions about submissions should be emailed to a**************i@unina.it