AAAI 2017 Fall Symposium on Natural Communication for Human-Robot Collaboration

OVERVIEW
As robots become more and more integrated into various work and living environments, there is a growing need to develop intuitive, natural ways for humans and robots to communicate for effective collaboration. The topic of natural human-robot communication has been studied by researchers from diverse communities including Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, Robotics, and Human-Computer Interaction. However, these communities tend to focus on specific challenges that are unique in their own disciplines, and there is relatively little collaboration across fields. This symposium aims to bring together researchers from different disciplines to brainstorm and discuss experimental ideas toward the common goal of natural human-robot interaction.

TOPICS
We welcome exploratory ideas and cross-disciplinary work. We target a broad set of topics related to natural communication between humans and robots including, but not limited to, the following:

• Natural language grounding for robotics
• Direction following for robots
• Human-robot dialogue
• Natural language generation
• Vision-language fusion
• Visual question answering & grounding
• Physical human robot interaction (pHRI)
• Nonverbal communication, e.g., gestures, eye gaze and facial effects

INVITED SPEAKERS
The current list of confirmed speakers includes:
Yejin Choi (University of Washington)
Sanja Fidler (University of Toronto)
Joyce Chai (Michigan State University)
David Traum (University of Southern California)
Benjamin Kuipers (University of Michigan)
Alborz Geramifard (Amazon Echo)

IMPORTANT DATES
July 21, 2017:                 Abstract/paper submission deadline
August 25, 2017:            Notification of acceptance
October 13, 2017:          Registration deadline
November 9–11, 2017:  Symposium

SUBMISSION INFORMATION
We invite participants to submit extended abstracts (max two pages, exclusive of one page for references) or full-length technical papers (max six pages, exclusive of one page for references) that describe recent or ongoing research. Papers should be in PDF format and adhere to the AAAI format.

Papers, abstracts, and supplementary materials can be submitted by logging in to the conference management website located at: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/NCHRC2017/

ORGANIZERS
Jean Oh (Carnegie Mellon University)
Matthew Walter (Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago)
Zhou Yu (University of California, Davis)

Contact email:  natural17organizers@gmail.com

Submission Deadline (if any): 21 July 2017