Sensing and COgnitive Principles in Embodied HRI
In this workshop we aim at addressing two innovative aspects in HRI:
- Cognitive principles, which are relevant to HRI and human robot collaboration (HRC). Some of these cognitive principles are joint attention, perspective taking, situational and cognitive load awareness as well as mental models. On the one hand, cognitive principles enable robots to understand, predict, and adapt to human actions and intentions; on the other hand, they can help to make the robot’s behavior more understandable, comprehensible and reliable for humans. Integrating such cognitive aspects could improve HRI and increase trust, acceptance and mutual understanding.
- Multimodal real-time sensing, which refers to the use of multiple input channels to perceive human behavior in real time. Real-time multimodal behavior sensing and evaluation in HRI focuses on enhancing a robot’s understanding of human intents and cognitive states as well as interpreting communication between humans and robots through various verbal and non-verbal channels, such as speech, gestures, facial expressions, and body language.
The goal of the SCOPE-HRI workshop is to stimulate discussion on the above-mentioned interrelated topics in order to enable robots to better apply cognitive principles in real time and via multimodal sensors to understand human intentions and emotions.
SCOPE-HRI targets at addressing all important aspects of human and robot behavior during embodied HRI. Cognitive principles provide the "why" and "how" humans behave, while multimodal real-time sensing provides the "what" and "when". Both the integration of cognitive models as well as multimodal sensing continuously evolve, particularly with the evolvement of AI and more specifically generative multimodal Large Language Models.
Workshop Agenda
September 10, 2025, at the ICSR 2025 in Naples
| 10:30 – 10:45 | Welcome and Opening |
| 10:45 – 11:15 | Invited talk by Keynote Speaker Prof. Alessandra Sciutti |
| 11:15 – 12:00 | 1st Interactive Session: Focus on Cognitive principles |
| 12:00 – 12:30 | Research Speed Dating |
| 12:30 – 13:30 | Lunch Break |
| 13:30 – 14:15 | 2nd Interactive Session: Focus on Multimodal interactions |
| 14:15 – 14:30 | Wrap up and closing |
Organisers
Dimitra Anastasiou is a lead researcher at Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST). In her academic career over the past 20 years, she has gained expertise in Computational Linguistics as well as Human Computer Interaction and User-Centered Design. In the last one and half year, she acquired the QT robot from LuxAI in Luxembourg, which she uses in various research projects, such as for entertainment, teaching coding as well as a feedback mechanism for a Human Digital Twin within the project AI4C2PS. She has 7 years of teaching experience and has organized 9 workshops at international conferences with the most recent one the workshop TEICAI 2024 (Towards Ethical and Conversational AI) workshop at the European Association for Computational Linguistics Conference. LinkedIn
Jauwairia Nasir is a postdoctoral fellow at the Chair of Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HCAI) at University of Augsburg, and head of research initiatives at Women in AI Labs. She did her PhD at the Computer Human Interaction for Learning and Instruction (CHILI) lab at EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland, and was an EU ITN Horizon 2020 Marie Curie fellow at ANIMATAS. Her research interests broadly include HMI, social robotics, multimodal behavioural analysis, and applied machine learning specifically in the fields of education and health care. She actively engages in community services at venues like HRI, RO-MAN, HAI, AAAI, and ICSR. LinkedIn
Ilaria Torre is an Assistant Professor in Human-Robot Interaction at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, and a Marie Skłodowska- Curie postdoctoral fellow at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, after obtaining her PhD from the University of Plymouth, UK, in 2017. Her research centers around improving communication between humans and robots. This includes both verbal (e.g. designing appropriate voices for robots) and nonverbal communication (e.g. designing legible behaviours to communicate information intuitively and effectively without language). LinkedIn
Mohammad Obaid is an associate professor in human-computer interaction. He has co-authored over 100 articles in the fields of HCI and HRI and has served on several organizing committees at various HCI and HRI conferences. His current research focuses on human-agent interaction and human-drone interaction. He recently co-authored a book on Robots in Education published by Routledge. LinkedIn
Nele Russwinkel is a professor and head of the Institute of Information Systems at the University of Lübeck. There, she leads the “Human-Aware AI” research group, which focuses on developing intelligent systems that can work synergistically with human partners in complex dynamic environments. Her goal is to investigate the cognitive processes that determine users' interactive behavior with technical systems. LinkedIn
Thomas Sievers has been a research assistant at the Institute of Information Systems at the University of Lübeck under the direction of Prof. Dr. Nele Rußwinkel since January 2022. After studying electrical engineering in the early 1990s, he worked as a web developer in agencies and has been self-employed for more than years. He is a graduate of the Advanced Study Program in AI at the University of Lübeck. His research interests lie in the areas of human-robot interaction, cognitive robotics and social robots. LinkedIn
Registration for this workshop is not necessary. If you have any questions, please contact us directly at dimitra.anastasiou(at)list.lu or t.sievers(at)uni-luebeck.de.
