HRI

We are excited to welcome you to the 17th Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human- Robot Interaction (HRI 2022)! This is the third time that the HRI research community cannot meet in person, because of the COVID-19 pandemic; originally, we planned and hoped for at least a hybrid conference to be hosted in Sapporo, to finally bring back the conference to Japan. Our theme "Breaking Boundaries," reflected this notion of breaking the boundaries between virtual and real-world spaces. However, there are more boundaries our community wants to break: between robotic technology and people - in order to create safe, meaningful, and wanted human-robot interactions for people and society, between scientific disciplines, communities, and backgrounds - in order to create new ways of thinking about our future lives with robotic technology. The HRI Conference is the premium venue for publishing and presenting top-quality HRI research and the virtual format might even allow us to attract and include more people who would not have the opportunity to travel to Japan.

The theme of "Breaking Boundaries" informed all our planning and we are excited to present a vibrant program for you to experience - that not only allows for knowledge exchange based on an outstanding technical program, but also for networking and social activities. We created a new Short Contributions track (special thanks at this point go to Severin Lemaignan (PAL Robotics) - he pushed this idea and was mainly responsible for realizing it!) and also a new "Systems" theme for full papers

This year's conference attracted 234 full paper submissions from 30 unique countries from Asia-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and North America. Each full paper was aligned with a theme-appropriate subcommittee, and subsequently reviewed through a double-blind process, which was followed by a rebuttal phase, and shepherding where found appropriate by the program committee. As a result of the review process, the program committee selected 57 (24.36%) of the submissions for presentation as full papers at the conference. As the conference is jointly sponsored by IEEE and ACM, papers are archived in both the ACM Digital Library and the IEEE Xplore. Along with the full papers, the conference program and proceedings include Short Contributions, Late-Breaking Reports, Videos & Demos, Alt.HRI, and a Student Design Competition section. Finally, the virtual format allowed us to have 21 workshops framing our conference program, including the HRI Pioneers workshop promoting and highlighting especially the work of early-career researchers in the field.