This is funding to support a workshop of approximately 30 graduate students and recent graduates from master's and doctoral programs in diverse communities (including computer science, engineering, psychology, cognitive science, and communications), along with distinguished research faculty. The event will take place on Wednesday, March 12, 2008, in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, immediately preceding the Third Annual Human Robot Interaction Conference (HRI 2008) to be held March 13-15, which is sponsored by ACM and cosponsored by IEEE. This workshop is designed to complement the conference by providing a forum for students and recent graduates in the field of human-robot interaction to present their current research before peers and a panel of senior researchers in a setting that is less formal and more interactive than the main conference. Student and faculty participants will talk about the important upcoming issues in the field, encouraging the formation of collaborative relationships across disciplines and geographic boundaries. The workshop will include three types of sessions: student presentations, breakout sessions, and group presentations. Participants will hear short presentations on current research from 12 selected participants, with time allotted for questions and discussion after each of these talks. Breakout sessions will divide the participants into 2-4 groups to discuss a focused question on common research themes posed by the organizers. The theme of HRI 2008 is "Living with Robots," which highlights the recent trend toward developing a new generation of robots capable of operating in human-centered environments, interacting with people, and participating in/assisting with their daily lives. The morning session of the workshop will pose questions related to conference-oriented themes (e.g., assistive robotics, awareness and monitoring of humans, long term interaction). The afternoon breakout session will involve a small group project in which participants must work together to address some facet of HRI in a given domain/application (e.g., design parameters, methods and techniques, relevant technologies). Following a keynote address from a distinguished researcher in the field, the group presentation session will provide each breakout group with the opportunity to present a summary to the entire workshop.
Broader Impacts: This workshop will afford a unique opportunity for the best of the next generation of researchers in human-robot interaction to be exposed to and discuss current and relevant topics as they are being studied in several different research communities (e.g., computer science and engineering, psychology, robotics, human factors and ergonomics, and human-computer interaction). This is important for the field, because it has been recognized that advances in research in this fledgling area can only come through the melding of cross-disciplinary knowledge and multinational perspectives. Participants will be encouraged to create a social network both among themselves and with senior researchers at a critical stage in their professional development, to form collaborative relationships, and to generate new research questions to be addressed during the coming year. Workshop organizers will act aggressively to recruit young researchers from minority and underrepresented groups in order to assure that the participants constitute a diverse group across a variety of dimensions, so that the students' horizons are broadened to the future benefit of the field.
