HRI

We are excited to welcome you to the Twelfth Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2017). The HRI Conference is a highly selective, single track, international meeting showcasing the best research in human-robot interaction, with roots in and broad participation from various communities of scholars, including but not limited to robotics, human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, engineering, social and behavioral sciences, and design.

The theme of this year's conference is "Smart Interaction," following our host city Vienna's ongoing "Smart City" initiative. Designed with increasingly intelligent capabilities, robots must utilize such intelligence also in their interactions with people to improve the effectiveness, naturalness, and intuitiveness of these interactions as well as their moral and ethical consequences. Achieving intelligence in interaction requires the multidisciplinary convergence of technical, social, and design perspectives. To represent this multidisciplinarity, we solicited and reviewed papers under four submission themes: "Human-Robot Interaction User Studies," "Technical Advances in Human-Robot Interaction," "Human-Robot Interaction Design," and "Theory and Methods in Human-Robot Interaction." Each submission theme was overseen by a dedicated theme chair and reviewed by a dedicated group of program committee members, who worked together with the program chairs to define and apply review criteria appropriate to each of the four contribution types.

The conference attracted 211 submissions from 38 unique countries from Asia-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and North America. Each full paper was aligned with a theme-appropriate subcommittee, and subsequently reviewed through a double-blind process, which was followed by a rebuttal phase, and shepherding where found appropriate by the program committee. As a result of the review process, the program committee selected 51 (24.2%) of the submissions for presentation as full papers at the conference. As the conference is jointly sponsored by IEEE and ACM, papers are archived in both the ACM Digital Library and the IEEE Xplore.

Along with the full papers, the conference program and proceedings include the Late Breaking Reports, Videos, Demos, and an alt.HRI section. Out of 144 total submissions, 142 (98.6%) Late Breaking Reports (LBRs) were accepted and will be presented as posters at the conference. A new peer-review process ensured that authors of LBR submissions received detailed feedback on their work. Sixteen (80.0%) short videos were accepted for presentation during a dedicated video session from 20 submissions. The program also includes 12 demos of robot systems that participants will have an opportunity to interact with during the conference. We continue to include an alt.HRI session in this year's program, consisting of 4 papers (selected out of 19 submissions) that push the boundaries of thought and practice in the field. This year, we have reintroduced the Student Design Competition event to encourage student participation in the conference and enrich the program with novel ideas and insights developed by student teams. Finally, we have the pleasure of presenting three inspiring keynote speakers who will discuss topics relevant to HRI: Dr. Cynthia Breazeal from the MIT Media Lab and Jibo Inc. in the USA, Dr. Lucia Jacobs from the University of California, Berkeley in the USA, and Dr. Danica Kragic from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Sweden. HRI 2017 was made possible through the significant volunteer efforts of the organizing committee, program committee, reviewers, and the steering committee. We thank the keynote speakers, financial supporters, and international reviewers for their support and participation. The conference is sponsored by ACM SIGCHI, ACM SIGAI, IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, and is in cooperation with AAAI and HFES.