The HRI community is a global populace consisting of research experts and practitioners from multiple fields and backgrounds. Related fields of study include robotics, human-computer interaction, human factors, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, education, entertainment, medicine, materials, and more.
The HRI community is a global populace consisting of research experts and practitioners from multidisciplinary fields and backgrounds. Related fields of study include robotics, engineering, computer science, human-computer interaction, human factors, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, education, entertainment, medicine, materials, and more. All of these fields contribute novel insights into the effectiveness and efficiency of HRI both in and outside of the laboratory. TAHRI promotes the inclusion of all experts who aim to contribute to the advancement of technologies for HRI and, thus, improve the fundamental nature of the relationship between robots and humans.
The goal of TAHRI is to unite, broaden, and promote a community in which technological ideas, research results, and emerging concepts can be openly shared, discussed, and leveraged to advance technological HRI and accelerate its transition from research to application. Over the past decade, we have been working with this community through various symposia, workshops, surveys, Slack discussions, in-person discussions, and more, and we have found that the community desires to have a dedicated space ("home") that gathers this community to share technological research results and data, to collaborate to address technological challenges and opportunities in HRI research, and to enable and promote replicability and repeatability toward the verification and validation of HRI research.
Join the community by subscribing to the TAHRI mailing list, following us on social media, or directly contacting us.
In previous surveys and discussions, our community expressed feelings that there was currently no single "home" for high-quality technological HRI work, instead feeling like visitors spread across multiple venues. Notably:
Researchers search for but don't consistently find high-quality technological HRI work at any one venue (though can find such work if searching across a variety of venues).
Researchers submit but don't consistently publish their high-quality technological HRI work at any one venue (though can publish such work if submitting across a variety of venues).
TAHRI seeks to be this "home", serving as a single venue in which researchers can search for, find, submit, and publish high-quality technological HRI work. Furthermore, the TAHRI website will grow as a platform to serve the community, providing a space for experts to share, discuss, and leverage resources to facilitate further technological HRI advances.
For more about how and why we are building this home, see the FAQ.
With TAHRI, we seek to develop a space—both physically during the symposium and virtually throughout the year—where our community can exchange ideas, discuss new technologies and research results, and offer solutions to the greatest challenges faced by the HRI community.
In previous surveys and discussions, our community identified four core program-related challenges in publishing their technological HRI work at existing conferences:
Challenges with review guidelines
Challenges with reviewer qualifications
Challenges with conference focus
Challenges with acceptance rates
TAHRI welcomes all who are interested in researching and learning about human-robot interaction. The myriad related fields of study (e.g., robotics, engineering, computer science, human-computer interaction, human factors, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, etc.) span a broad and fascinating spectrum of intellectual and application domains. We also recognize that diverse teams and perspectives are critical to the success of equitable and inclusive HRI technologies, and community members represent and reflect a growing and diverse set of backgrounds, expertise, interests, and opinions.
At TAHRI, we are committed to promoting a welcoming environment where people are respected and included, where research findings and data are made accessible, and where the free exchange of ideas and HRI innovation is enabled. Together, we can advance HRI research, promote the adoption of technological HRI, and build and foster the HRI community.
TAHRI welcomes a broad range of contributions related to technological HRI research, which are expected to be similar to those found in the Technical and Systems paper tracks at the HRI conference, as well as technological HRI work found at IROS, RO-MAN, ICRA, RSS, and other robotics-related conferences. With TAHRI, we are building a home at which technological HRI researchers can gather in one venue, rather than be spread out across many different venues.
The 2024 TAHRI symposium is co-located with the 2024 HRI conference; however, they are two completely independent events, with separate proceedings, registration, formats, activities, and organizers. The HRI conference is a high-quality venue for broader topics in HRI (including technical and systems tracks) and the co-location of our events enables individuals to attend both events, which we strongly encourage—we'll be at the HRI conference ourselves! To promote participation at the HRI conference, TAHRI offers registration discounts for HRI conference attendees and sponsorship discounts to HRI conference sponsors. TAHRI serves to supplement the more general topics of the HRI conference with more focused discussions on technology development for HRI systems.
TAHRI is committed to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), and our assessment guidelines and publication processes are designed to enable impact-based evaluation rather than strengthening point-based metrics. TAHRI will not advertise impact factors and will not put a limit (cap) on the number of accepted papers to achieve a specific acceptance rate; instead, papers will be accepted based on their intellectual merits and broader impacts within the community. To further promote impact, TAHRI emphasizes replicability in its review process and strongly encourages authors to share their technical resources, including the open-sourcing of code and data with links to repositories to be made available with the archived papers. Finally, TAHRI asks authors of accepted papers to specify the type of contribution of each author.
At the strong request of the community, full papers (i.e., standard review papers and rapid review papers) will be indexed / archived in the TAHRI proceedings, which will be published in the ACM International Conference Proceedings Series (ICPS). Short papers will not be archived. Authors should choose the format that best suits the work and their goals.
TAHRI is run by volunteers within the community and the event itself is currently not affiliated with a professional society (e.g., ACM, IEEE, AAAI, etc.). This is intentional, as it maximizes our flexibility, allowing us to make decisions about our program in a way that we feel best serves the community. After this inaugural symposium, we will consider if joining an established professional society is right for TAHRI and its community.
After ten successful years, the AAAI Fall Symposium on Artificial Intelligence for Human-Robot Interaction (AI-HRI) will be concluding in October 2023, with its community moving to the bigger home of TAHRI. Whereas AI-HRI focused on the intersection of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), TAHRI seeks to create a bigger space for more general technological advancements in HRI beyond that of just AI. TAHRI is completely independent of AI-HRI, and is not affiliated with the AAAI Symposium Series that previously hosted AI-HRI.
The community felt the term “symposium” was slightly more appropriate because TAHRI is a two-day event more focused on a particular aspect of HRI (namely, the technology), whereas a “conference” is often longer in duration and broader in scope. That said, in further discussions with the broader research communities, we found no clear or consistent distinction in terminology.
While there are certainly other conferences that address topics similar to TAHRI, the community identified that the focus of those other conferences was too broad or not appropriate for work that emphasizes the application and advancement of the technological aspects within HRI, and, thus, would require fundamental programmatic changes (e.g., different review guidelines, reviewer qualifications, and/or acceptance criteria) to those other conferences.
The community expressed feelings of “conference overload” and did not want to travel to “yet another conference”; however, the community also indicated interest in a multi-day event (i.e., more than a single-day workshop) co-located with an existing conference. To accommodate this request, the inaugural TAHRI symposium will be held on March 9-10, 2024 in Boulder, CO, USA, two days before and co-located with the 2024 HRI conference. By co-locating, individuals traveling for one event have the opportunity to attend both events, which we encourage, as there is a large overlap between both communities, and we want to make TAHRI as accessible as possible to everyone.
First, we announced TAHRI when a subset of our technological HRI community was already gathered in-person at IROS 2023, enabling that community to meet and discuss the symposium. Second, as TAHRI is co-located with the 2024 HRI conference, we did not want to interfere with or draw attention / contributions away from their full paper deadline on September 29th, 2023; fortunately, authors are not limited to either the HRI conference or TAHRI—if a technological HRI contribution is reviewed by the HRI conference, but is not selected for publication there, then authors have the opportunity to revise and resubmit their technological HRI paper to TAHRI as a rapid review paper.
Generally, we consider technological HRI to be work focused on the advancement of the underlying technology enabling the interaction between a robot and a human. More formally, we define technological HRI as robots, platforms, hardware, software, sensors, actuators, perception, control, algorithms, models, mechanisms, methods, interfaces, architectures, frameworks, benchmarks, datasets, tools, techniques, or other technologies that, with reasonable effort, can be incorporated into the design, development, or deployment of an HRI system.
The word “technical” refers to the application of a set of techniques to a particular subject, art, or craft, which is not necessarily “technological” in nature; for example, an artist, athlete, baker, or musician can all be technical in the performance of their craft. Thus, the community felt it important to acknowledge that non-technological HRI contributions can still be technical, while simultaneously distinguishing the focus of the event around technological contributions.
Our logo takes inspiration from the philosophy and symbol of the Yin and Yang, representing a balance between human and robot, with one side representing each. Each icon started as a Yin-Yang, which was then modified to feature a combination of circle and square shapes, with the former representing the more soft/organic nature of humans, and the latter representing the more firm/synthetic properties of robots. Each icon is a symmetric 180-degree rotation of the other.