[agents] Invitation to to participate in workshop on "Human-Agent-Robot Teams" (HART), December 13-17, Lorentz center, Leiden

[Virginia Dignum - TBM]

HART - Human-Agent-Robot Teamwork

from 13 Dec 2010 through 17 Dec 2010

 

Participation is by invitation. If you are interested in participate
please register your interest at
http://www.lorentzcenter.nl/lc/web/2010/422/info.php3?wsid=422
<http://www.lorentzcenter.nl/lc/web/2010/422/info.php3?wsid=422> 

 

The workshop program foresees space for selected presentations by
participants. Please submit a title and abstract before 7 November 2010,
to m.v.dignum at tudelft.nl <mailto:m.v.dignum at tudelft.nl> . Notifications
will be sent by November 20. 

 

The workshop will be held at the Lorentz Center, an international
visitor's center in the sciences, at Leiden University. Its aim is to
organize workshops for scientists in an atmosphere that fosters
collaborative work, discussions and interactions.

Besides keynotes talks, the program includes work groups, panel sessions
and time for informal discussions. The program will be available soon on
the webpage.

Keynote speakers:

 

*             Kerstin Dautenhahn, UK

*             Gal Kaminka, Israel

*             Stefan Kopp, Germany

*             Maarten Sierhuis, USA

 

 

Description

Human-machine interaction is increasingly important in domains where
artificial systems are expected to take up tasks, take initiatives, make
decisions, and coexist and collaborate with people. The arrival of
robots in human society is inevitable. Recently, the South Korean
government has predicted that by 2020, every Korean household will have
a robot . There is a need to understand the consequences of the
interaction (cooperation, competition, coordination) between people and
robots or agents. Humanlike communications capabilities are necessary
for systems to operate in everyday settings such as home, office,
shopping, and museum environments. In these situations, machines should
be able to transcend the role of mere tools and begin to collaborate
with humans to accomplish complex tasks. Examples of such contexts are
search-and-rescue domains, military operations, and space exploration.
Unlike autonomous systems designed primarily to take humans out of the
loop, the future lies in supporting people, agents, and robots working
together in teams in close and continuous human-robot interaction.

Teamwork has become a widely accepted metaphor for describing the nature
of multi-robot and multi-agent cooperation. The notion of teamwork
involves some notion of communication, shared knowledge, goals, and
activities that function as the glue that binds team members together.
By virtue of a largely reusable explicit formal model of shared
intentions, team members attempt to manage general responsibilities and
commitments to each other in a coherent fashion that both enhances
performance and facilitates recovery when unanticipated problems arise.
For example, a common occurrence in joint action is when one team member
fails and can no longer perform in its role. A general teamwork model
might entail that each team member be notified under appropriate
conditions of the failure, thus reducing the requirement for
special-purpose exception handling mechanisms for each possible failure
mode. The multi-agent systems community has been focusing on how
distributed software agents can jointly perform tasks. For software
agents and robots to participate in teamwork alongside people in
carrying out complex real-world tasks, they must have some of the
capabilities that enable natural and effective teamwork among groups of
people. Just as important, developers of such systems need tools and
methodologies to assure that such systems will work together reliably
and safely, even when they are designed independently and operated with
reduced human situational awareness.

The HART research field studies and develops theories, methods, and
tools in support of humans, agents and robots working together in teams.
The overall objective is to develop the theories underlying efficient
and effective teamwork and the necessary methods, tools and technology
for the development of agents and robots capable of such teamwork. This
emerging field is inherently inter-disciplinary, thus the workshop
brings together researchers from computer science, artificial
intelligence, cognitive science, anthropology, social psychology,
ergonomics, robotics, organizational psychology, and human technology
interaction.

Aims

This workshop aims to create a roadmap of the relevant research
questions and topics for the coming two, five and ten years. Without
such a roadmap, the dedicated HART-researchers will focus on their
individual disciplines and will fail to address the fundamental and
inherently interdisciplinary questions of the field. For example,
roboticists will understandably focus on engineering the physical
capabilities of the robot and will not address the social implications
of human-robot interaction. At the same time, social scientists will not
understand the limitations of robots due to engineering problems.  Young
research from the contributing disciplines need such a roadmap to
effectively start off their careers in this fascinating field. They will
be the ones that will achieve the major breakthroughs that will allow
humans, agent and robots to live and work together in a peaceful and
productive society.

The roadmap will discuss how each discipline will contribute to the
HART-field by formulating the research questions per discipline in
cooperation with the relevant other disciplines. That way the relations
between the disciplines will become clear, and research teams can be
formulated for each research question in which it is clear which
research discipline is in the lead, and which will contribute. The
workshop highlights the importance of the technical and social issues
underlying long-term human-machine interaction towards companion and
assistive machines for long-term use in everyday life and work
activities.