Dear colleagues,

We would like to invite you for the Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) 2022 Workshop on Robot Curiosity in Human-Robot Interaction (RCHRI). Note that we are introducing a fee waiver program for equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) at our workshop on Robot Curiosity in Human-Robot Interaction at HRI 2022. The fee waiver program is sponsored by Google.

Please see below for details.

** Our apologies for cross postings **

=============================================================================== HRI 2022 Workshop on Robot Curiosity in Human-Robot Interaction (RCHRI) ===============================================================================

Website: https://sites.google.com/view/rchri/home Date & Time: 09:00 AM - 06:00 PM (EST) on March 7, 2022 Location: Virtual, as part of the 17th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2022) Contact for inquiries: Ali Ayub (a****b@uwaterloo.ca)

=============================================================================== Fee Waiver Program ===============================================================================

Our goal is to make RCHRI inclusive and accessible to all. Towards this goal we are introducing a fee waiver program for 1st time participants at RCHRI from countries, institutions, or populations that may have difficulty attending our workshop (and the HRI main conference) due to special circumstances. This program would waive the registration fee for the HRI main conference and the RCHRI workshop.

Eligibility Criteria:

First time attendee to RCHRI, who may or may not have a paper accepted.

Attending university (BS, MS, PhD, Researcher, Postdoc) in countries listed in Band A or additional countries.

Have some special circumstances that restrict you from having the means to attend or afford the conference (e.g., do not have sufficient income, are retired, unemployed, permanently disabled, or other). Categories are taken from https://www.ieee.org/membership/special-circumstances.html but are not limited to these.

Fee waivers will be granted on a first-come, first-served basis, subject to budget availability. The deadline for application is March 06th.

Applicants can apply by filling out this form: https://forms.gle/WKffXoTKTbPY4rCT9

=============================================================================== Aim and Scope of the Workshop ===============================================================================

One of the fundamental modes of learning in children is through curiosity. Children (and adults) interact with new people, learn about novel objects, activities and other stimuli through curiosity and other intrinsic motivations. Creating autonomous robots that learn continually through intrinsic curiosity may result in breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. Such robots could continue to learn about themselves and the world around them through curiosity, thus improving their abilities over their ‘lifetime’. Although recent works on curiosity in different fields have produced significant results, most of these works have focused on constrained simulated environments which do not involve human interaction. However, in real-world applications such as healthcare, home-assistance etc., robots generally have to interact with humans on a regular basis. In these scenarios, it is imperative that curiosity is directed towards seeking out and learning important information from the humans when needed rather than simply learning in an unsupervised manner. Further, there is limited work on how humans perceive such curious robots and whether humans prefer curious robots that adapt over time to other robots that simply perform their assigned tasks. In this workshop, our goal is to bring together researchers and practitioners in different multidisciplinary fields to discuss the role of robot curiosity in real-world applications and its implications in human-robot interaction (HRI).

=============================================================================== Confirmed Keynotes & Panelists ===============================================================================

• Edith Law, University of Waterloo • Maya Cakmak, University of Washington • Georg Martius, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems • Christoph Salge, University of Hertfordshire • Goren Gordon, Tel-Aviv University

=============================================================================== Organizers ===============================================================================

• Ali Ayub, University of Waterloo • Marcus Scheunemann, University of Hertfordshire • Christoforos Mavrogiannis University of Washington • Jimin Rhim, McGill University • Kerstin Dautenhahn, University of Waterloo • Verena Hafner, Humboldt-Universitat Berlin • Chrystopher Nehaniv, University of Waterloo • Daniel Polani, University of Hertfordshire

=============================================================================== Contact ===============================================================================

For questions about submissions, please contact:

Ali Ayub (a****b@uwaterloo.ca)