IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development
Special Issue on
Behavior Understanding and Developmental Robotics

Call for Papers

We solicit papers that inspect scientific, technological and application
challenges that arise from the mutual interaction of developmental robotics
and computational human behavior understanding. While some of the existing
techniques of multimodal behavior analysis and modeling can be readily
re-used for robots, novel scientific and technological challenges arise
when one aims to achieve human behavior understanding in the context of
natural and life-long human-robot interaction. We seek contributions that
deal with the two sides of this problem:

1- Behavior analysis for developmental robotics: Robots need to be capable
to learn dynamically and incrementally how to interpret, and thus
understand multimodal human behavior. This includes for example learning
the meaning of new linguistic constructs used by a human, learning to
interpret the emotional state of particular users from para-linguistic or
non-verbal behavior, characterizing properties of the interaction or
learning to guess the intention, and potentially the structure of goals of
a human based on its overt behavior. Furthermore, robots need in particular
to be capable of learning new tasks through interaction with humans, for
example using imitation learning or learning by demonstration. This heavily
involves the capacity for learning how to decode teaching behavior,
including linguistic and non-linguistic cues, feedback and guidance
provided by humans, as well as inferring reusable primitives in human
behavior.

2- Behavior analysis through developmental robotics: Developmental social
robots can offer stimulating opportunities for improving scientific
understanding of human behavior, and especially to allow a deeper analysis
of the semantics and structure of human behavior. Humans tend to interpret
the meaning and the structure of other's behaviors in terms of their own
action repertoire, which acts as a strong helping prior for this complex
inference problem. Since robots are also embodied and have an action
repertoire, this can be used leveraged as an experimental and theoretical
tool to investigate human behavior, and in particular, the development and
change of behavior over time.

Topics include the following, among others:
Adaptive human-robot interaction
Action and language understanding
Sensing human behavior
Incremental learning of human behavior
Learning by demonstration
Intrinsic motivation
Robotic platforms for behavior analysis
Multimodal interaction
Human-robot games
Semiotics for robots
Social and affective signals
Imitation

Contributions can exemplify diverse approaches to behavior analysis, but
the relevance to developmental robotics should be clear and explicitly
argumented. In particular, it should involve one of the following: 1)
incremental and developmental learning techniques, 2) techniques that allow
adapting to changes in human behavior, 3) techniques that study evolution
and change in human behavior. Interested parties are encouraged to contact
the editors with questions about the suitability of a manuscript.

Editors:
? Albert Ali Salah, Bogazi?i University,
salah@boun.edu.tr

? Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, INRIA,
pierre-yves.oudeyer@inria.fr

? ?etin Meri?li, Carnegie Mellon University,
cetin@cmu.edu

? Javier Ruiz-del-Solar, Universidad de Chile,
jruizd@ing.uchile.cl


Three kinds of submissions are possible:
? Regular papers, up to 15 double column pages, should describe new
empirical findings that utilize innovative methodological and/or analytic
techniques.
? Correspondence papers, up to 8 double column pages, can focus on a
limited set of relevant aspects in depth.
? Survey papers, describing classes of behavior analysis approaches in
developmental robotics. Before submitting a survey paper, the authors
should contact the guest editors.

Instructions for authors:

http://cis.ieee.org/ieee-transaction...velopment.html

We are accepting submissions through Manuscript Central at

http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tamd-ieee
(please select ?Human Behavior
Understanding? as the submission type)
When submitting your manuscript, please also cc it to the editors.

Timeline:

30 April 2013: Deadline for paper submission
15 July 2013: Notification of the first round of review results
15 October 2013: Final version
20 October 2013: Electronic publication
December 2013: Printed publication