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CALL FOR PAPERS

Special Session on Nonverbal Communication Skills in Humans and Robots 

within the 31st IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN 2022) 

Napoli, Italy, August 28- September 2, 2022 

http://ro-man2022.org/ 

Submission code: ujcjj 

Special session website: https://nonverbal-communication-skills.github.io/ 

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*AIM AND SCOPE* 

We are approaching a future where social robots will progressively become widespread in many aspects of our daily lives, including education, healthcare, work, and personal use. All such practical applications require that humans and robots collaborate in human environments, where social interaction is unavoidable. Along with verbal communication, successful social interaction is closely coupled with nonverbal communication. Humans perform nonverbal communication in an instinctive and adaptive way, with no effort. For robots to be successful in our social landscape, they should therefore engage in social interactions in a human-like manner, with increasing levels of autonomy. Understanding human-human interaction is therefore the most natural guide to designing human-robot interaction interfaces that can be usable and understandable by everyone. The key aim of this special session is to bring forth efforts to understand mechanisms underlying human-human nonverbal communication and introduce novel approaches to the design, development, and evaluation of robotic platforms inspired and driven by those mechanisms. This special session will bring together researchers with diverse backgrounds, ranging from social psychology, cognitive science, machine learning, computer vision, and human-robot interaction, to share innovative ideas, findings, and challenges related to nonverbal communication skills in humans and robots. The special session will foster multidisciplinary discussions among academic and industrial researchers towards improving robots’ nonverbal communication skills and enhancing human trust and acceptance of robots. 

*TOPICS* 

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following: 

– Analysis and synthesis of multimodal nonverbal cues, including facial expressions, paralinguistics, eye gaze, head movements, body postures, and hand gestures within an interaction context. 

– Analysis and synthesis of affective states, such as emotions, empathy, personality, and engagement. 

– Co-modelling of nonverbal and verbal cues. 

– Co-speech gesture generation. 

– Machine learning approaches to nonverbal communication analysis and synthesis. 

– Societal and ethical considerations of cognitive and social robots, including transparency, bias, fairness, and privacy. 

– Applications of cognitive and social robots in healthcare, education, workplace, or entertainment. 

– Databases and tools for nonverbal communication analysis and synthesis. 

*SUBMISSION PROCEDURE* 

Manuscripts submitted to this special session should be done through the paper submission website of the main conference: http://ras.papercept.net/conferences/scripts/start.pl

All papers submitted to special sessions will be subject to the same peer-review procedure as the regular papers. The accepted papers will be included in the conference proceeding published in the IEEE Xplore. Please refer to the main conference website to have additional details. 

Authors should adhere the following steps for submitting a paper to this special session: 

1. Create an account: go to https://ras.papercept.net/, to create a PIN and fill out the form. Ask all your co-authors to do the same if they do not have an account on the system yet, write down the authors' PINs (this information is needed for manuscript processing purposes). 

2. Go to Support Menu (http://ras.papercept.net/conferences/support/support.php) and depending on how you are preparing your paper, download a template: LaTeX or MS-Word, use these templates/style files to create the paper and save in PDF format. 

3. Upload the paper: go to https://ras.papercept.net/ and click on “submit a contribution to Ro-Man 2022”. 

4. Submit special session paper. 

5. Make sure to insert the code of this special session: ujcjj . 

6. Fill in the form presented on the next page (make sure to enter all author PINs created in Step 1). 

*SPECIAL SESSION ORGANISERS:* 

Oya Celiktutan, King’s College London, United Kingdom   

Nguyen Tan Viet Tuyen, King’s College London, United Kingdom   

Marine Chamoux, SoftBank Robotics Europe, France 

Alexandra Georgescu, King’s College London, United Kingdom   

Mutlu Cukurova, University College London, United Kingdom   

Pierre Lison, Norwegian Computing Center, Norway   

Ho Seok Ahn, University of Auckland, New Zealand   

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On behalf of the Organisers,

Nguyen Tan Viet Tuyen