Category: News

Second Edition Writing Workshop

We started to write on our second edition of “Human-Robot Interaction” to be published with Cambridge University Press and Hanser in 2023. The writing workshop took place in Christchurch and we made great progress. We have a brand new chapter, extension to existing sections and exercise questions for students. Can’t wait for this book to come out.

Flaky Conferences and Journals in Human-Robot Interaction

I recently published a podcast episode in which I had the pleasure to interview the organisers of a fraudulent conference that had accepted my nonsense paper. In the meantime, more and more invitations to flaky and potentially fraudulent and predatory conferences come across my desk. They follow the same schema as the Science Horizon Conferences. It is time to start a list. I will try to keep this list updated as new invitation to submit come in. Please contact me if you cam across an event or journal that would qualify for this list.

Flaky Conferences, Symposiums and Forums

Flaky Journals

Pre-Order Discounts

Promotional discounts available.

Our book is almost ready for shipping and you can order the book at Cambridge University Press. There are two promotional discounts available. There is a 30% discount available until April 22nd with the code 99451 during checkout. A second code worth 20% is available until December 2020 with the code HRI2020. Please consider ordering the book to support the struggling publishing business.

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Best Paper Award at the HRI2019 Conference

Tony Belpaeme won the best paper award at the HRI2019 conference.

Tony Belpaeme and his team won the Best Paper Award at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction 2019 for their paper “Second Language Tutoring using Social Robots:A Large-Scale Study“. You can download a free copy of the paper here.

The abstract of the paper is:

We present a large-scale study of a series of seven lessons designed to help young children learn English vocabulary as a foreign language using a social robot. The experiment was designed to investigate 1) the effectiveness of a social robot teaching children new words over the course of multiple interactions (supported by a tablet), 2) the added benefit of arobot’s iconic gestures on word learning and retention, and 3)the effect of learning from a robot tutor accompanied by a tablet versus learning from a tablet application alone. For reasons of transparency, the research questions, hypotheses and methods were preregistered. With a sample size of 194 children, our study was statistically well-powered. Our findings demonstrate that children are able to acquire and retain English vocabulary words taught by a robot tutor to a similar extent as when they are taught by a tablet application. In addition, we found no beneficial effect of a robot’s iconic gestures on learning gains.

Book Progress Update

We are completing the last updates on the book and hope to be able to submit the final draft to the publisher next week. We have cleared the copyright for more than a hundred figures. The next steps will be the copy editing and layout from Cambridge University Press.