GROUND24: advancing GROup UNderstanding and robots' aDaptive behavior RSS 2024 Delft, Netherlands, July 19, 2024

As social and cognitive robots become increasingly integrated into our daily lives and are introduced into multi-party contexts such as schools, care facilities, and workplaces, it is crucial to ensure that their behavior considers the complex social dynamics present in these scenarios. However, studying group dynamics in HRI entails inherent challenges from both a technical (e.g., tracking multiple users simultaneously) and a theoretical point of view (e.g., modeling multiple agents who dynamically influence each other). New challenges await the HRI community, such as ensuring that social robots can adapt to the needs of individual group members while also considering the group as a whole, susceptible to subtle and hidden social norms and balances. Furthermore, it is crucial that robots do not exhibit biases or unethical behavior in these contexts, eventually leading to negative consequences such as social exclusion.  Participants are invited to share innovative strategies for exploring group-robot interactions, providing a fresh and insightful viewpoint to: (1) using social robots for understanding group dynamics; (2) designing robots able to interact with groups. Also, the discussion will involve the ethical implications of researching group dynamics, including potential negative outcomes such as biases toward group members.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Understanding group dynamics through the use of social robots.
• Promoting natural communication, mutual understanding and trust in human-robot mixed groups.
• Adaptation and personalization to groups.
• Learning strategies for autonomous behaviors of robots in groups.
• Designing social robots able to interact with groups.
• Modeling, understanding, and predicting group behaviors.
• Exploring different robot’s roles (e.g., peer, teacher, helper or friend) in group interactions.
• Gamification in multiparty human-robot interactions.
• Interdisciplinary collaborations between roboticists, game designers, psychologists, and sociologists.
• Novel experimental designs for conducting group-robot interaction research.
• Ethical considerations in researching group dynamics and potential biases or negative consequence

Submission format: (2-4 pages + references)

The submitted contribution must be written in English and do not need to be anonymized (single-blind review process). A panel of experts from relevant fields will be asked to review the contributions, selecting the most relevant, novel, original, and high-quality ones to be included in the workshop program. The contributions may include work in progress with preliminary results, technical reports, case studies, surveys, and state-of-the-art research.

Authors are invited to present their contributions in the workshop poster session to facilitate open discussion in groups after a short pitch to the audience. They will be offered the option of uploading their papers to a workshop-specific archive in an open-access repository (e.g., arXiv). The organizers are also working on a follow-up Special Issue in the Journal of Interaction Studies. Authors will be invited to submit an extended version of their contribution to reach the broad research community. More details will follow.

For any inquiry, please contact us at workshop.ground@gmail.com.