Dear Sir/Madam,

Enclosed is the CFP for a robot workshop in Göteborg, Sweden in January 
2005
  - please distribute to others who may be interested!

Sorry for multiple postings.


Regards,

~~~~~~ s a r a ~ l j u n g b l a d~~~~~~~~~~

[log in to unmask]
+46 (0)73-733 48 93
www.viktoria.se/~saral
Future Applications Lab www.viktoria.se/fal
Viktoria Institute www.viktoria.se
Göteborg, Sweden




INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP
VIKTORIA INSTITUTE, GÖTEBORG, SWEDEN, JANUARY 13-14, 2005:

http://www.viktoria.se/fal/events/robotworkshop

How can robot research inspire applications for people’s everyday lives 
and habits? Perhaps our future butlers will not look like humanoids, 
but rather be like tiny insects that cooperate in large numbers to 
perform complex tasks? Today, entertainment robots are given 
characteristics that make them suitable as pets or to provide comfort, 
domestic robots are designed to help with housekeeping such as vacuum 
cleaning or lawn mowing, and professional service robots to support 
security and health care. Robots in more basic research are not 
explicitly designed to serve humans in social settings. Still, many of 
these robots have appealing human-robot and robot-robot interaction 
properties (e.g. emergence of behaviours, self-assembly, and sensing 
and communication abilities). These characteristics can inspire 
entirely novel robot applications for domestic as well as other 
everyday settings, such as a schools and workspaces.

The workshop aims to investigate and explore possible robot 
applications in domestic and other everyday environments. The specific 
robots explored in the workshop can be domestic and entertainment 
robots (e.g. Sony’s Aibo, Nec’s PaPeRo), humanoids (e.g. Honda’s Asimo, 
Sony’s Qrio) professional service robots, insect inspired robots and 
robots on wheels (like the so-called SwarmBots created in a European 
project). We hope that each participant has an interest in a specific 
robot, and that the characteristics of that robot will inspire one or 
several applications. The motivation is to invent robot applications 
that make it interesting for people to interact with robots on an 
everyday basis. We are interested in questions such as: What 
characteristics of robots can create new possibilities for everyday 
interactions with humans? What novel robot services can be achieved 
with combining several robots in an everyday setting, or by combining 
robots with other media?

We expect all participants to send a personal statement before the 
workshop. During the workshop participants will hold a brief 
presentation to introduce robots used in their own research. We also 
encourage participants to bring physical demonstrators or posters. This 
will be used as a basis when brainstorming about possible applications.

To participate, first please send an expression of interest as soon as 
possible. We will then contact you with full details.
Timeline:

Expression of interest to [log in to unmask]             As soon as possible!
Personal statement and registration                             December 20
Workshop date:                                                  January 13-14, 2005

A minor fee (50-100 euro) will be charged to cover expenses such as 
lunch and guest speaker.

Workshop website: http://www.viktoria.se/fal/events/robotworkshop

Organisers:

Future Applications Lab, Viktoria Institute, Göteborg, 
www.viktoria.se/fal

This workshop is an initiative based on research conducted within the 
ECAgents project, supported by IST-FET in the Complex Systems 
initiative. ECAgents project homepage: http://ecagents.istc.cnr.it/