HRI 2017 has seen the largest participation of any HRI conference to date and an exciting programme has been enjoyed by all. The organisation and steering committees want to thank the community for their continued engagement with HRI and the great time that was had in Vienna. And now, without further ado, this year’s AWARDS:

1 BEST VIDEO AWARD

As, due to technical problems during the award ceremony, this video has not been shown to all participants yet, the list of awards shall feature it first.

Robot’s Delight – A Lyrical Exposition on Learning by Imitation from Human-human Interaction (Page 408)

Dylan F. Glas (ATR)
Malcolm Doering (ATR)
Phoebe Liu (ATR)
Takayuki Kanda (ATR)
Hiroshi Ishiguro (Osaka University)

2 Best regular Paper Awards

2.1. BEST PAPER AWARD DESIGN

Cellulo: Versatile Handheld Robots for Education (Page 119)

Ayberk Özgür (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne)
Séverin Lemaignan (EPFL & Plymouth University)
Wafa Johal (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne)
Maria Beltran (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne)
Manon Briod (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne)
Léa Pereyre (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne)
Francesco Mondada (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne)
Pierre Dillenbourg (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne)

2.2. BEST PAPER AWARD HUMAN-ROBOT INTERACTION USER STUDIES

Two papers were awarded this year in this category.

Why Do They Refuse to Use My Robot?: Reasons for Non-Use Derived from a Long-Term Home Study (Page 224)

Maartje de Graaf (Brown University)
Somaya Ben Allouch (Saxion University of Applied Sciences)
Jan van Dijk (University of Twente)

Growing Growth Mindset with a Social Robot Peer (Page 137)

Hae Won Park (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Rinat Rosenberg-Kima (Tel Aviv University)
Maor Rosenberg (Tel Aviv University)
Goren Gordon (Tel Aviv University)
Cynthia Breazeal (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

2.3. BEST PAPER AWARD TECHNICAL ADVANCES IN HUMAN-ROBOT INTERACTION

Creating Prosodic Synchrony for a Robot Co-player in a Speech-controlled Game for Children (Page 91)

Najmeh Sadoughi (University of Texas at Dallas & Disney Research Pittsburgh)
André Pereira (Disney Research Pittsburgh)
Rishub Jain (Disney Research Pittsburgh & Carnegie Mellon University)
Iolanda Leite (Disney Research Pittsburgh)
Jill Fain Lehman (Disney Research Pittsburgh)

2.4. BEST PAPER AWARD THEORY AND METHODS IN HUMAN-ROBOT INTERACTION

The Robotic Social Attributes Scale (RoSAS): Development and Validation (Page 254)

Colleen M. Carpinella (Disney Research)
Alisa B. Wyman (Disney Research)
Michael A. Perez (Disney Research)
Steven J. Stroessner (Disney Research)

3 Student Design Competition

3.1. 1ST PRIZE STUDENT DESIGN COMPETITION

Raven: A Street Robot to Address Homelessness (Page 397)

Haodan Tan (Indiana University)
Fuchang Yang (Indiana University)
Nava Teja Tummalapalli (Indiana University)
Chetan Bhatia (Indiana University)
Kaustubh Barde (Indiana University)

3.2. 2ND PRIZE STUDENT DESIGN COMPETITION

The Interactive Drawing Book (Page 395)

Ji Young Min (Ewha Womans University)
Gyeong Sun Kim (Ewha Womans University)

3.3. DELEGATES’ CHOICE STUDENT DESIGN COMPETITION

Snoozle – A Robotic Pillow that Helps You Go to Sleep: HRI 2017 Student Design Competition (Page 399)

Jered Vroon (University of Twente)
Cristina Zaga (University of Twente)
Daniel Davison (University of Twente)
Jan Kolkmeier (University of Twente)
Jeroen Linssen (University of Twente)

4 Service Awards

4.1. STUDENT COMMUNITY SERVICE AWARD

PRESENTED TO MARKUS BAJONES FOR EXCEPTIONAL SERVICE CONTRIBUTION TO HRI 2017

4.2. COMMUNITY SERVICE AWARD

PRESENTED TO ASTRID WEISS FOR EXCEPTIONAL SERVICE CONTRIBUTION TO HRI 2017

5 BEST DEMONSTRATION AWARD

MiRo: An Animal-like Companion Robot with a Biomimetic Brain-based Control System (Page 50)

Tony J. Prescott (University of Sheffield)
Ben Mitchinson (Consequential Robotics)
Sebastian Conran (Consequential Robotics)

6 BEST LATE BREAKING REPORT AWARD

Playing the Mirror Game with a Robot: Who Takes the Lead, and What Movements are Most Liked? (Page 159)

Shir Kashi (Ben Gurion University)
Amit Loutati (Ben Gurion University)
Shelly Levy-Tzedek (Ben Gurion University)

You can access all HRI 2017 publications free of charge over our website at http://humanrobotinteraction.org/2017/programme/proceedings/ and http://humanrobotinteraction.org/2017/programme/companion-proceedings/.

We welcome everybody to Vienna to HRI 2017! We know you are looking forward to the coming days. Today is workshop day, tomorrow, the regular conference takes off. Also, don’t miss today’s welcome reception.

Telepresence

Did you have to stay at home and we miss you here in Vienna?

We are excited to announce that the HRI 2017 conference will have telepresence available for you to log in during the sessions and watch remotely.  For those of you who are unable to attend HRI this year in person, please express your interest in attending specific sessions via telepresence (provided by our supporters Revolve Robotics and Suitable Technologies) using this link. You will be asked to indicate which sessions you are interested in attending.  Prior to that session, you will receive an invitation email with a link to download the software and join the meeting for a specified timeframe.

Please keep in mind that the availability and quality of your telepresence experience is dependent on internet connection.  Therefore, please understand that at times connection may be slow or unavailable.  We will do our best to provide you with the best experience possible.  If you experience issues, please email jbeer@cse.sc.edu or mcakmak@cs.washington.edu.

The HRI 2017 organization committee is proud to announce that the programme is nearing completion. All sessions are scheduled and the full papers assigned to those sessions. Take a look at the detailed programme or the overview below:

We have 1 tutorial and 6 workshops accepted for HRI 2017. Read more on the Tutorial/Workshop page. All tutorials and workshops are scheduled for Monday, March 6, 2017.

Here the titles of accepted tutorials and workshops:

• Tutorial 1: Robust Motion Detection and Tracking for Human-Robot Interaction
• Workshop 1: The Role of Intentions in HRI
• Workshop 2: Privacy-Sensitive Robotics
• Workshop 3: Robots for Learning
• Workshop 4: Towards Reproducible HRI Experiments: Scientific Endeavours, Benchmarking and Standardization
• Workshop 5: Growing-Up Hand in Hand with Robots: Designing and Evaluating Child-Robot Interaction from a Developmental Perspective
• Workshop 6: Clinically Meaningful Advancements of Socially Assistive Robots Through Systematic Data Collection and Sharing

First of all: If you are an author of a submitted full paper, you can expect the notification and final decision, including reviews, to be released in the coming hours. Make sure to watch your in
box!

In total, of the 211 valid full paper submissions (a record number for HRI), only 51 were accepted (24% acceptance rate). The papers went through an intensive process reviewing, rebuttal, meta-reviews, sometimes championing, and detailed discussion at the PC meeting, which concluded on Saturday, Nov 19, with the final discussions and decisions.

How were the decisions made?

As with all submissions to HRI, a senior subcommittee chair assigned papers to a Program Committee (PC) member who served as the primary reviewer. This PC member assigned the paper to a minimum of three reviewers with expertise on the topic of your submission and interpreted these reviews to write a meta review. Authors had the
opportunity to provide a rebuttal, and the primary reviewer managed a discussion among the reviewers. A second PC member was assigned to confirm that the paper was appropriately evaluated, reviewing the paper, all the reviews, and your rebuttal, and to provide an additional perspective on the contributions of your work.

The Program Committee met in person for a 2-day meeting, led by the senior subcommittee chairs, where the papers that were discussed included the ones with an average score of at least 2.5, high variance in reviewer scores, or was “championed” by either the primary or secondary PC member for discussion. Championing ensures that papers that the PC members found to have important contributions, but might have received low scores, would still be discussed at the PC meeting.

At the Program Committee meeting, subcommittees met to discuss papers in light of their theme-specific evaluation criteria. Next, the entire Program Committee met as a large group to discuss the broader pool of papers, cutting across all subcommittees.

During the PC meeting, the quality of the paper, the reviews, and the rebuttal were discussed to form a conclusion about acceptance or rejection as well as to provide the best possible feedback in the reviews.