Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction

Abstract

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the Eighth International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction HAI 2020 (Virtual Conference); hosted by the Western Sydney University (Australia) and supported by Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden). The conference is a venue with an interdisciplinary nature to discuss and disseminate state-ofthe- art research on topics related to human interactions with a range of agent systems, including physical robots and humanoids, virtual agents, socially interactive agents, and Artificially Intelligent (AI) agents. The topical areas of the conference include user studies, frameworks, simulations, technical developments and more within Human Agent and Robotic Interaction. The conference brings together a large variety of multidisciplinary research groups, companies, and researchers looking into the broader area of agents and robotics across Australia, Japan and the rest of the world. The theme for HAI 2020 is "Artificial Intelligence + Experience Design." The recent advent of AI has motivated researchers to focus on several algorithmic prospects in developing intelligent robotic agents and their interactions. Progressively, AI advances are leading to exciting outcomes in the HAI field and, at the same time, are opening up for a wide perspective on how to design intelligent robotic agents. For example, how to combine artificial intelligence and user experience design approaches in human-agent interaction. We are looking forward to sharing the latest research results of HAI that contribute a broad range of disciplines. Three keynote talks are featured. The first is titled "We're in This Together: Social Robots in Group, Organizational, and Community Interactions", by Associate Prof. Selma Šabanović, Indiana University Bloomington, USA. The second is titled "What kind of human-centric robotics do we need? Investigations from human-robot interactions in socially assistive scenarios", by Prof. Ginevra Castellano, Uppsala University, Sweden. The third is an industry talk titled "The rapid rise in drone technology", by Sebastian Robertson, CEO of BIRDI, Australia. Their keynote talks will provide cross-disciplinary examples of novel HAI research and applications that are highly inspiring for the HAI audience and research community. This year's submissions have come from more than 25 countries and cover leading-edge topics including human and machine learning, conversational agents, empathy and trust of social robots, social drones, social presence, robot applications, virtual agent applications and novel perspectives of HAI. With an acceptance rate of 38% (25 papers out of 65 submissions), the program committee has again set a high quality standard. In addition, 26 out of the 35 latebreaking poster papers submissions were accepted.