It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 13th Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction-HRI'18. The HRI Conference is a highly selective international meeting showcasing the best research in human-robot interaction (HRI), with broad participation from various communities of scholars, including robotics, human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, engineering, social and behavioral sciences, and design.
The theme of this year's conference is Robots for Social Good, considering two trends that have shaped HRI-related technologies in the past year. One is that after many years of research, social robots are being finally introduced 'en masse' as consumer devices. And the second is a worldwide recognition, increasingly appreciated in the consumer software sector, that developers of new technologies need to be cognizant of the societal consequences of psychologically impactful devices.
Balancing this societal and humanistic goal with the continuous evolution of technology, both in hardware and software, requires the multidisciplinary view that the HRI conference offers. To support this coming together of research areas, 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 an expert 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 206 submissions from contributors worldwide, including 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. Following the review process, the program committee selected 49 (23.8%) 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.
This year, accommodating for the continued growth of the HRI conference, and with the goal of allowing for ample presentation, discussion, and informal meeting time, we have started to adopt a dual-track format for some of the full paper sessions. This also allowed us to plan for presenting papers from alternative tracks, such as alt HRI, and experiment with new presentation formats, under the principle of reevaluating our methods and processes, as appropriate for a conference covering a rapidly evolving field.
Along with the full papers, the conference program and proceedings include Late Breaking Reports, Videos, Demos, and an alt.HRI section. Out of 137 total submissions, 123 (89.8%) 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. Fourteen short videos were accepted for presentation during a dedicated video session. The program also includes 9 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 5 papers (selected out of 14 submissions, 35.7%) that push the boundaries of thought and practice in the field. We are also continuing last year's reintroduction of 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.
