Important Dates
- Submission of proposals: October 10, 2025, 23:59 pm AoE
- Notification of acceptance: November 21, 2025
- Workshop website URL due: December 12, 2025
- Tutorial and workshop day at the conference: March 16, 2026
We invite you to organise a workshop or tutorial for the 21th Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2026). HRI is a highly selective conference which aims to showcase the very best HRI research. It has interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary roots in robotics, social psychology, cognitive science, HCI, human factors, artificial intelligence, engineering, and many other disciplines.
Each year, the HRI conference highlights a particular theme. For HRI 2026, the theme is “HRI Empowering Society”. We encourage tutorial and workshop proposals to build upon this theme, whether by topic, structure, or ways to engage participants.
Organisers may propose for their HRI 2026 tutorial or workshop to be offered fully in-person fashion. Organisers must commit that at least one organiser will hence attend in person to facilitate the in-person activities. Tutorials and workshops will be held in the 1-2 days before the main conference program sessions. Submission instructions for organizers are below.
Workshops
Workshops are an opportunity for participants to meet other members of the HRI community, to discuss problems and to present their ideas around a common topic. The workshops can be half-day or full-day, and can cover any topic relevant to HRI research, design, methodologies, or education. Interdisciplinary approaches are particularly welcome.
Given increasing numbers of workshop proposals each year, and a desire to host the maximum number of exciting workshops possible, we encourage organisers to consider proposing a half-day workshop in the first instance. Full-day proposals will still be considered, but should well-motivate why a full day is necessary to deliver on the overall workshop aims.
Workshop proposals will be evaluated across metrics covering relevance and interest to the HRI community, fit with this year’s conference theme, potential to engage and generate discussion amongst participants and plans for recruitment/dissemination. In the case that multiple proposals are ranked similarly along these metrics, priority will be given to proposals which exhibit diversity in their organisational team from a geographical and seniority perspective. Workshops should follow the ACM Open Access Publishing Model.
The responsibilities of workshop organizers include:
- Setting up a website for the workshop that will be linked to the HRI 2026 website.
- Publicizing the workshop and soliciting position papers from potential participants.
- Selecting workshop participants based on the quality of their position papers, which outline the submitters’ views on the workshop topic and the reasons for submitters’ interest.
- Running the in-person workshop at the conference.
- Optionally, compiling workshop proceedings and/or finding opportunities for formal publication of extended versions of position papers after the workshop.
- Optionally, soliciting and coordinating the appearance of invited speakers at the workshop. Organizers who plan on inviting speakers to their tutorial or workshop are encouraged to invite a diverse set of speakers.
Please submit the following information (up to 3 pages including references):
- Title of workshop.
- Organizer(s), including contact information and short CVs.
- Overview of the workshop including schedule, format, and types of activities (e.g., whole-group discussions, break-out sessions, position paper presentations, etc.).
- Target audience or prerequisites.
- Information about room equipment needed
- If feasible, the number of expected participants (e.g. if this is a recurring workshop, or builds on a previous event) and/or any limits in terms of maximum number of participants (e.g. for group activities).
- Approach for recruiting participants.
- Plan for documenting the workshop.
- A 150 – 250 word abstract suitable for advertising the workshop in HRI 2025.
Tutorials
Tutorials are an opportunity for dissemination of community knowledge, where participants can get “up to speed” on important topics for the field. Example topics could be state-of-the-art overviews of particular HRI areas, hands-on programming activities with particular robot/software APIs, or design/research and data analysis methods. Interdisciplinary approaches are particularly welcome.
Given increasing numbers of proposals each year, and a desire to host the maximum number of exciting events possible, we encourage organisers to consider proposing a half-day proposal in the first instance. Full-day proposals will still be considered, but should well-motivate why a full day is necessary to deliver on the overall tutorial aims.
Tutorial proposals will be evaluated across metrics covering relevance and interest to the HRI community, fit with this year’s conference theme, potential to engage and generate discussion amongst participants and plans for recruitment/dissemination. In the case that multiple proposals are ranked similarly along these metrics, priority will be given to proposals which exhibit diversity in their organisational team from a geographical and seniority perspective.
The responsibilities of tutorial organizers include:
- Setting up a website for the tutorial that will be linked to the HRI 2026 website.
- Publicising the tutorial.
- Running the in-person tutorial at the conference.
- Optionally, compiling tutorial proceedings after the workshop.
Please submit the following information (up to 3 pages including references):
- Title of tutorial.
- Motivation or background.
- Overview of tutorial including topics covered and schedule.
- Target audience or prerequisite.
- Information about room equipment needed
- Any limits in terms of maximum number of participants (e.g. for group activities).
- Tutorial speaker(s), including biosketches/short CVs.
- Links and references relevant to the tutorial.
- A 150–250 word abstract suitable for advertising the tutorial at HRI 2025.
Submission Details
Workshop and tutorial proposals should be no longer than 3 pages.
Workshop proposals must be submitted in PDF format and conform to ACM Proceedings specifications. Please note that we are following the general ACM SIG format (“sigconf”, double column format), not the SIGCHI format. Templates are available at this link (US letter).
In addition, ACM has partnered with Overleaf, where you can start writing using this link directly (note that this Overleaf document uses the new ACM workflow by default, which is not what HRI is using; to fix this, make sure the document uses the “sigconf” document class, rather than the “manuscript,screen,review” document class that is enabled in the Overleaf document by default).
Workshop and tutorial proposals should be submitted via the PCS submission system (pending, will open early September). All submissions will undergo a review process by the Workshop and Tutorial Chairs plus other experts.
Contacts
Workshops and Tutorials Chairs: Katie Winkle (Uppsala University), Micol Spitale (Politecnico di Milano).