Trust, Acceptance and Social Cues in Human-Robot Interaction - SCRITA

This workshop will be a half day event in the afternoon on 26 August 2024, in conjunction with the IEEE RO-MAN 2024 conference, held in Pasadena, California (USA).

Statement of Objectives

State-of-the-art literature agrees that people's ability to accept and trust robots is a fundamental prerequisite for a fruitful and successful coexistence between humans and robots. The previous editions of this workshop have highlighted how huge advances have been made in studying and evaluating the factors affecting people's acceptance and trust in robots in controlled or short-term (repeated interactions) settings,. At the same time, they also agree that several open challenges for scientists in robotics, AI and HRI need to be overcome to develop service, personal and collaborative robots that can calibrate and maintain people's acceptance and trust in robots. In particular, these robots need to be able to proactively adapt their behaviours to the situational context, and people's social and tasks-related expectations. Another very important aspect is that the field of HRI still lacks metrics that allow for an effective and unmistakable assessment of people's trust towards robots. During last year's workshop edition (i.e., SCRITA@RO-MAN 2023), together with leading researchers and exceptional speakers from various fields, we started working towards developing such novel methods. We outlined current methods and their strengths, discussing how these measures do not always reflect appropriately, or how some questions might be ambiguous and leave room for interpretation by individual participants. We identified five main factors affecting trust to be investigated to generate a new metric that allows researchers to assess and reduce common side effects influencing how people put their trust in robots.

This workshop focuses on the continuous investigation of these unresolved and new open challenges. In particular, we want to look into the dynamics between people and robots to foster short interactions and long-lasting relationships taking inspiration from different domains, such as educational, service, collaborative, companion, care-home and medical robotics. For that, this workshop aims to facilitate a discussion about people's trust towards robots in the field, inviting workshop participants to contribute their past experiences, lessons learnt and future issues.

Audience and Topics

The workshop will be open to a broad audience from academia and industry researching social robotics, machine learning, robot behavioural control, and user profiling. In particular, we aim to integrate expertise from roboticists with psychologists' and sociologists' insights and experiences to foster a multidisciplinary and human-focused discussion that can capture the multi-faceted nature of trust and acceptance. We will foster the exchange of views on past and ongoing research and contribute to the discussion of innovative ideas for tackling unresolved issues by providing new and inspirational directions for research.

We again expect a vibrant and successful event with a similarly high number of participants as in the previous editions of this workshop.

Invited speakers

The following speakers have agreed to give a keynote talk:

• Selma Šabanović, Indiana University Bloomington, USA

News

• 24-06-14 Submission deadline extended to 14 July 2024.
• 24-05-31 Submission deadline extended to 14 June 2024.
• 24-05-29 The workshop will happen on 26 August 2024, afternoon.
• 24-04-26 Invited speaker confirmed: Selma Šabanović.
• 24-03-08 The seventh edition of SCRITA has been confirmed as a workshop at RO-MAN 2024.
• 23-01-18 Preview website set up.