Special Session on Developmental Social Robots: reasoning about human intention and action in social interactions.

The aim of this proposed Special Session is to present recent research conducted in the field of developmental and social robotics and study the harmonious relationship between human and robot in a social environment. The focus will be on how to improve the robots reasoning to engage with humans over a long period of time, the significance of cognitive control to modulate actions in a social environment. Furthermore, the strategies learned by observing young children interacting and learning from their caregivers as well as from objects, will be discussed. Therefore, this Special Session will ask from a developmental perspective the questions: How robots should integrate themselves in social situations? How robots should evolve control mechanisms over time? And how to become more socially acceptable? Hence, the question of appropriate embodiment should be one important step in the discussion.

Bearing these ideas in mind, we are targeting for instance, developmental as well as social robotics, developmental science, neuroscience and cognition. This Special Session is intended for an audience from multidisciplinary background and will attempt to provide an equal exposure between observations, robotics and human centered research.