Call for Papers Deadline: Special Issue T-CDS

On 30 Jun, 2017
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IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems (TCDS) Special Issue on "A sense of interaction in humans and robots: from visual perception to social cognition"

Guest Editors

Alessandra Sciutti 
Nicoletta Noceti 

Important Dates

30 March 2017 - Deadline for title and abstract submission
30 June 2017 - Deadline for manuscript submission
15 September 2017 - Notification to authors
15 October 2017- Deadline for submission of revised manuscripts
15 November 2017 - Final decisions
Winter 2017 - Special Issue Publication in IEEE TCDS

Aim and Scope

Since early infancy, the ability of humans at interacting with each other is substantially strengthened by vision, with several visual processes tuned to support prosocial behaviour. For instance, a natural predisposition to look at human faces or to detect biological motion is present at birth. More refined abilities - as the understanding and anticipation of others' actions and intentions- progressively develop with age, leading, in a few years, to a full capability of interaction based on mutual understanding, joint coordination and collaboration.

A key challenge of robotics research nowadays is to provide artificial agents with similar advanced visual perception skills, with the ultimate goal of designing machines able to recognise and interpret both explicit and implicit communication cues embedded in human behaviours. These achievements pave the way for the large-scale use of Human-Robot Interaction applications
on a variety of contexts, ranging from the design of personal robots, to physical, social and cognitive rehabilitation.

This special issue is aimed at gathering contributions from different research communities, including Robotics, Computer Vision, Cognitive Science, Psychology and Neuroscience, to create a comprehensive perspective on the topic of social interaction in humans and robots, with a specific reference to the role of human and machine perceptual abilities in supporting interactive skills. Contributions may focus on human visual perception for interaction on the one hand, and on the implementation of machine vision methods aimed at improving human-human or human-machine interaction on the other. This multidisciplinary effort is expected to bring innovations in fields as social robotics and human- machine interaction, but also in domains like developmental psychology and cognitive rehabilitation.

Themes

Understanding how efficient and seamless collaborations can be achieved among human partners and which are the explicit and implicit cues intuitively adopted in human cooperation would provide key insights on how to model a similar ability in the future interactive machines. This special issue wants to address these relevant questions both from the side of the study of human perception for interaction and from the implementation perspective, considering new algorithms and modelling efforts brought forward to improve current robotics.

Topics include (but are not limited to) the following:
Computational Models of Visual Perception for Interaction
Perception of Intentions and Actions
Vision for Robotics and Artificial intelligence in Social Contexts
Neuroscientific bases of Interaction
Development of Social Cognition in Humans
Social Signals Recognition and Analysis
Human-Robot Interaction
Emotion Recognition for Interaction
Machine Learning for Visual Perception

Submission

Manuscripts should be prepared according to the "Information for Authors" of the journal found at: http://cis.ieee.org/ieee-transactions-on-cognitive-and-developmental-systems
and submissions should be made through the IEEE TCDS Manuscript center at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tcds-ieee
selecting the category "SI: Human Robot Interaction".

Prospective authors are kindly asked to contact the guest editors by sending an e-mail to alessandra.sciutti@iit.it , and nicoletta.noceti@unige.it
providing a tentative title and abstract of the contribution by 30 March, 2017.