The 2nd Workshop on Public Space Human-Robot Interaction (PubRob 2014)

Multimodal, multi-party, real-world human-robot interaction

Held as part of the International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2014)
Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey
16 November 2014


Workshop overview

The development of robots capable of interacting with humans has made tremendous progress in the last decade, leading to an expectation that in the near future, robots will be increasingly deployed in public spaces, for example as receptionists, shop assistants, waiters, or bartenders. In these scenarios, robots must necessarily deal with situations that require interactions that are short and dynamic, potentially with multiple persons at once.

To support this form of interaction, robots typically require specific skills, including robust video and audio processing, fast reasoning and decision making mechanisms, and natural and safe output path planning algorithms. This physically embodied, dynamic, real-world context is the most challenging possible domain for multimodal interaction: for example, the state of the physical environment may change at any time; the input sensors must deal with noisy and uncertain input; while the robot platform must combine interactive social behaviour with physical task-based action.

This workshop brings together researchers from a range of relevant disciplines to explore the challenges and solutions for multimodal human-robot interaction from different perspectives. This workshop is the third in a series of meetings organised around this theme.

Invited speakers

Daniel Gatica-Perez, Idiap Research Institute, Martigny, Switzerland
Ryo Ishii, NTT Communication Science Laboratories, Kanagawa, Japan

Papers and slides

The official proceedings for this workshop are available from the ACM Digital Library. A workshop report is also available. (Note that the ACM has abbreviated this workshop MMRWHRI'14.) 

Programme committee

Mary Ellen Foster, Heriot-Watt University, United Kingdom
Andre Gaschler, fortiss GmbH, Germany
Manuel Giuliani, University of Salzburg, Austria
Robin Hill, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Simon Keizer, Heriot-Watt University, United Kingdom
Sebastian Loth, Universität Bielefeld, Germany
Kira Mourão, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Ron Petrick, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Markos Sigalas, Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas, Greece
Zhuoran Wang, Heriot-Watt University, United Kingdom

Organisers

Mary Ellen Foster, Heriot-Watt University, United Kingdom
Manuel Giuliani, University of Salzburg, Austria
Ron Petrick, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom

This workshop was organised in the context of the JAMES project (Grant no. 270435, 2011-2014), funded by the European Commission through the 7th Framework Programme.