*Call for Papers* - *Interactive Robot Learning*
Workshop @ 2008 Robotics: Science and Systems Conference

http://www.dfki.de/cosy/www/events/InteractiveRobotLearning2008/

The organizers invite you to submit an *abstract* for review to the RSS 
2008 Workshop on Interactive Robot Learning. The workshop will take 
place on Saturday, *June 28th* at *ETH Zurich, Switzerland*.

*Important Dates*
- abstract submission deadline - April 30th
- notification of acceptance - May 15th
- workshop - June 28th

*Description*

This workshop on Interactive Robot Learning will span the breadth of 
research questions at the intersection of Machine Learning and 
Human-Robot Interaction.

Many future applications for autonomous robots bring them into human 
environments as helpful assistants to untrained users in homes, offices, 
hospitals, and more. These applications will often require robots to 
flexibly adapt to the dynamic needs of human users. Rather than being 
pre-programmed at the factory with a fixed repertoire of skills, these 
personal robots will need to be able to quickly learn how to perform new 
tasks and skills from natural human instruction. While there are 
numerous examples of successful applications of Machine Learning 
algorithms, this scenario poses new problems for the field. Learning in 
real-time from everyday people, unfamiliar with Machine Learning or 
robotics, is a new domain with new challenges for the field.

There are several open research questions in Interactive Robot Learning, 
these are some of the topics we hope to address in this full-day workshop:

* Typical metrics of Machine Learning success may not be appropriate for 
interactive robot learning. In addition to speed and efficiency of the 
learning process, there are other dimensions of success like the ease of 
interaction and the transparency of the process for the human.
* What kinds of input can one expect a human partner to provide? Often 
input channels are specified by the robot learning designer, but we need 
to also consider whether or not this will be intuitive for an everyday 
human user.
* How to best integrate human input into Machine Learning algorithms. A 
fundamental question is: Do we need new algorithms, or reformulations of 
existing algorithms?
* A significant topic for the workshop will be highlighting new work and 
state-of-the-art approaches to robots learning from people: Learning by 
demonstration, Learning by imitation, Reinforcement Learning, among others.

*Keywords*
* Human-Robot Interaction
* Machine Learning
* Learning by demonstration
* Learning by imitation
* Reinforcement learning with human input
* Active Learning
* Communication of knowledge and metaknowledge
* Identification of new requirements for machine learning in social domains
* Identification of suitable metrics for interactive learning
* User studies in interactive robot learning

*Submission*

All accepted abstracts will be published in a workshop proceedings. New 
results are welcome. We also encourage researchers with relevant work to 
retarget previously published results to the workshop topic. Authors 
will be asked to present their work as a talk or poster.

All submissions should be a research abstract in PDF format using the 
RSS template ( 
http://www.roboticsconference.org/doc/rss2008_paper_template.tgz). 
Abstracts should be two pages in length and describe the material to be 
presented at the workshop.

Submissions should be emailed to athomaz_@_cc_._gatech_._edu by April 
30th. Notification of acceptance will be given on or before May 15th.

*Organizers*
* Andrea L. Thomaz (Georgia Institute of Techonolgy)
* Geert-Jan M. Kruijff (Language Technology Lab, DFKI GmbH)
* Henrik Jacobsson (Language Technology Lab, DFKI GmbH)
* Danijel Skocaj (University of Ljubljana)

ABSTRACT SUBMISSION DEADLINE: APRIL 30, 2008