Towards novel concepts of social presence for robots

General topic. Acceptance and diffusion of social robots, within human everyday con- texts, are processes in which the “social presence” of such robotic agents plays a key role. Specialists in social robotics and related fields often consider this characteristic as the ability of a robot to generate, in its human users, the “feeling of being in the company of someone” (e.g., Heerink et al., 2008; Damiano, Dumouchel, 2018). Typically, the social presence of a robotic agent is construed, both at the conceptual and at the implementation level, as a combination of traits, skills or performance enabling these “social machines” to communicate with us through social signals compatible with ours – i.e., a wide variety of social signals, ranging from gestures to emotional expressions. This workshop aims to explore whether and how the notion of the social presence of robots can be further articulated and enhanced in order to facilitate, on one side, the acceptance and inclusion, in human social contexts, of this new class of artificial social actors, and, on the other side, a form of social co-evolution with these machines capable of supporting positive human self-development. 

Objectives. The workshop aims to provide an interdisciplinary forum in which researchers in social robotics and related disciplinary areas can propose, investigate and discuss new trajectories for the development of the above-mentioned notion of social presence for robotic agents, with a particular attention towards the potential that these novel paths can express regarding the general objective of a positive human self-development through technology. The main goal of our workshop is twofold. 

Firstly, we intend to consider and critically explore cutting-edge research related to new, rich, plural notions of robotic social presence and possible ways of implementing them in social robots. Within the workshop, we aim to perform such an exploration not just from a technical, but also from theoretical, epistemological, social, and ethical point of view, in order to focus the attention of the participants on the concrete possibility of mixed human-robot ecologies in which humans co-exist with robotic agents characterized by a variety of different ways of being social, and able to stimulate human social and ethical growth. 

Secondly, we target the creation of a scientific transdisciplinary community engaged in building a roadmap for the evolution of the social presence of robots. Through this workshop we would like to gather engineers, social human-robot interaction experts, robot designers, as well as scholars in human sciences and ethics, to collaborate in designing the next generations of social robots for human social and ethical self-development.