International Summer School on Social Human-Robot Interaction

The International Summer School on Human-Robot Interaction (26-30 August 2013, Cambridge, UK) is a 5 day event for young researchers offering a range of talks, lectures, tutorials and ateliers on the scientific and technical aspects of social Human-Robot Interaction. A carefully selected panel of lecturers will offer a current overview of a particular topic, with the aim of giving the summer school participants a balanced introduction. Tutorials will introduce techniques and technologies, such as software architectures, hardware platforms or experimental techniques. Finally, ateliers give the participants the opportunity to engage with hands-on activities, such as designing solutions or implementing prototypes.

Speakers and topics include: Fuhimide Tanaka (University of Tsukuba), child robot interaction; Brian Scassellati (Yale), social robotics; Maja Pantic (Imperial College), social signal processing; Kim Bard (University of Southampton), social interaction in primates and lessons for HRI; Mark Neerincx and Rosemarijn Looije (TNO), HRI experimental procedures; Karl MacDorman (Indiana University), Attitudes to human-like robots; Ben Kröse (Universiteit van Amsterdam), Smart environments for social HRI; Ivana Kruijff-Korbayová (DFKI), Natural Language Interaction for HRI; Bram Vanderborght (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), Robot Assisted Therapy; Takayuki Kanda (ATR), long-term HRI with young users; Jean-Christophe Baillie (Aldebaran Robotics), the Nao robot platform; Aardman Animations; Designing life from lifeless material.

All speakers are internationally recognised scholars, who in addition are engaging speakers, able to inspire a young generation of researchers and entrepreneurs.

The proposed summer school's focus on involving researchers from different research areas contributes to the EPSRC's strategy on collaborative working in autonomous systems and robotics. This also contributes to the ICT Theme's "Working Together" priority. Given the focus on networking, we involve both industry, user representatives as well as academics.

The summer school will impact at various levels: it will train a young generation of researchers for the growing field of human-robot interaction (HRI). HRI has considerable academic and industrial potential (see, for example, the support for robotics and HR in the recent monograph by Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO).

The UK is one of the leaders in the field of HRI and affective computing, and the summer school will be used to showcase and convey this.