Gaze in HRI: From modeling to communication

The purpose of this half-day workshop is to explore the role of social gaze in human-robot interaction, both how to measure social gaze behavior by humans and how to implement it in robots that interact with them. Gaze directed at an interaction partner has become a subject of increased attention in human-robot interaction research. While traditional robotics research has focused work on robot gaze solely on the identification and manipulation of objects, researchers in HRI have come to recognize that gaze is a social behavior in addition to a way of sensing the world. This workshop will approach the problem of understanding the role of social gaze in human-robot interaction from the dual perspectives of investigating human-human gaze for design principles to apply to robots and of experimentally evaluating humanrobot gaze interaction in order to assess how humans engage in gaze behavior with robots. Computational modeling of human gaze behavior is useful for human-robot interaction in a number of different ways. Such models can enable a robot to perceive information about the state of the human in the interaction and adjust its behavior accordingly. Additionally, more humanlike gaze behavior may make a person more comfortable and engaged during an interaction. It is known the gaze pattern of a social interaction partner has a huge impact on one´s own interaction behavior. Therefore, the experimental verification of robot gaze policies is extremely important. Appropriate gaze behaviour is critical for establishing joint attention, which enables humans to engage in collaborative activities and gives structure to social interactions. There is still much to be learned about which properties of human-human gaze should be transferred to human-robot gaze and how to model human-robot gaze for autonomous robots. The goal of the workshop is to exchange ideas and develop and improve methodologies for this growing area of research.