Special Issue in the International Journal of Social Robotics

Our special issue on “Expectations, Intentions, and Actions in Human Robot Interaction” is just about to appear. The editorial and most of the articles are online on the journal homepage already. Please have a look at http://www.springer.com/engineering/robotics/journal/12369 and check out the Online First Articles.

Marc Hanheide, Hendrik Zender and I thank all authors for their great contributions!

Tutorial on evaluation in HRI at ICSR

I am co-organizing a tutorial on “evaluation in human-robot interaction – integrating system and user centered perspectives” at the International Conference on Social Robotics in Amsterdam. The tutorial will take place on November, 23 and give insights into data acquistion, processing, and analysis with a focus on interdisciplinary cooperation. Please find more information on the tutorial website.

We are looking forward to seeing you there!

RO-MAN conference 2011

I presented two papers at Ro-Man conference this year. One was about the function of off-gaze in human-robot interaction. The paper answers the question of when and why the users turn away from the robot and to the experimenter in human-robot interaction.

The second paper is entitled “Bridging the Gap between Users’ Expectations and System Evaluations”. It proposes an approach to measure the users’ expectations and their importance before the interaction and to compare these ratings with the evaluation of the system after the interaction.

If you want to know more about any of the papers please find them here.

SORO Special Issue on Expectations, Intentions, and Actions – DEADLINE EXTENDED!

The deadline of the Jounal of Social Robotics Special Issue on “Expectations, Intentions, and Actions” has been extended to May, 1. However, we want to ask all authors to notify us of their intention to submit a paper until April, 15. Please find more information here http://www.dfki.de/~zender/soro-eia/
We are looking forward to your contributions!

EUCogII Euron Workshop: Challenges, Good Experimental Methodology, and Benchmarking

I will give an invited talk on “Challenges in the Evaluation of Interactive Cognitive Systems” at the EUCogII Euron Workshop: Challenges, Good Experimental Methodology, and Benchmarking at the euRobotics Forum EURON/EUROP Annual Meeting in Västerås, Sweden on April 8, 2011

HRI conference 2011

I am happy to say that our HRI workshop on “The role of expectations in intuitive HRI” was a success. Together with 38 researchers from various fields we discussed about the impact of expectations on intuitive human-robot interaction. For some material and the proceedings please visit the workshop website.

Alltogether, the conference was very inspiring and I certainly went home with new impressions and ideas.

HRI Workshop Program is online

The program for our HRI Workshop on “The role of expectations in intuitive human-robot interaction” is now online at http://introbotics.eu/HRI2011/. We are looking forward to interesting presentations and good discussions.

SORO Special Issue on Expectations, Intentions, and Actions

We (Hendrik Zender, Marc Hanheide, and I) are organizing a Social Robotics special issue on Expectations, Intentions, and Actions.

The deadline of submission is April, 15, 2011. For the cfp and more information see: http://www.dfki.de/~zender/soro-iea/

We are very much looking forward to your contributions!

Dissertation Prize

I’m proud to say that I was awarded the dissertation prize of the Westfälisch-Lippische Universitätsgesellschaft (WLUG) on Friday, February 18th. In particular, this makes me happy because I received the prize of the Technical Faculty, despite having a background in social science. After all, with respect to my work this shows that the users are increasingly important in the process of designing robots

(http://ekvv.uni-bielefeld.de/blog/pressemitteilungen/entry/westf%C3%A4lisch_lippische_universit%C3%A4tsgesellschaft_pr%C3%A4miert_beste; http://www.nw-news.de/lokale_news/bielefeld/westen/uni_fh/4258319_Bekenntnis_zur_Universitaet.html)

Workshop on Benchmarking and Evaluation of Interactive Cognitive Systems is coming up

The Workshop on Benchmarking and Evaluation of Interactive Cognitive Systems will take place in Bielefeld in the next two days (http://www.cit-ec.de/BCogS_2011/. Many well-known speakers are invited and will discuss the following questions:

What is the impact of existing challenges and competitions on the development of technical systems? How should they be adapted or changed in order to meet future needs?

What are the requirements that enable the comparison of approaches and techniques on a system level? What is needed in terms of standard platforms, software frameworks, interfaces, and multi-modal corpora?

Can we measure the “cognitive skills” of a system? If so, what are appropriate metrics and measurements? How can they be related to system design decisions and possible bottlenecks?