Social interaction with robots and agents: Where do we stand, where to do we go?

Robots and agents are becoming increasingly prominent in everyday life, e.g. as companions, user interfaces to smart homes, household robots, or for lifestyle reassurance.

In these roles, they have to interact with their users in a complex social world, and should build and maintain long-term relationships with them. The European FP7 project "Social Engagement with Robots and Agents" (SERA, http://project-sera.eu/) has set out to make progress in the study of social interaction with such artefacts, taking a fresh and application-oriented look at the requirements and models, but also at the methods with which to develop theories and models.

Much research has been done already on prerequisites for, and modelling of, social robots and agents. The complexity of the task sometimes seems overwhelming, however. The aim of this special session is to address some fundamental questions:

• What do we know already about social interaction with agents and robots, and about the role of emotions in it?
• How can existing theories and data be of use in advancing our knowledge? How should we study them to extend our knowledge of social interaction with robots and agents?
• Which additional data, experiments, disciplines and methods should be called upon?
• Are existing approaches to affective modelling capable of modelling both episodic and pervasive emotions in social agents and robots? What additional requirements and methods may be required to model these emotions?
• Do we know enough to model systems that build and maintain long-term relationships with users? Are existing theories sufficient to explain what happens in this kind of social interaction, and existing models sufficient to generate it? What types of additional theories and models would be required? What types of data would be required and what are the best means of obtaining such data?

Format:

• Welcome, outline of the session's goals, introduction of panellists, and projection of video sequences.

  The project SERA sets up a field study in which subjects interact with a robotic user interface (the Nabaztag - http://www.nabaztag.com), enhanced with some sensor and ASR technology in their homes, over the period of one week. Video data from the first round of the study with the "baseline system" will be available in time for ACII. We will show an extract and contrast it with a video of human-human interaction. The videos will be made available to the panellists well before the conference so that they can watch, analyse, comment, and refer to them in their presentations.

• Statement of challenges, questions to the panellists

  The panelists will have been given those questions in advance, so that they can discuss and refer to them in their presentations.

• Brief presentations by the 4 invited speakers, addressing the questions and challenges, and referring to the video sequences
• Discussion among panelists only
• Questions and discussion contributions from the audience

Panelists