People are increasingly finding themselves interacting with computerized agents, such as autonomous and tele-presence robots in homes, healthcare, or in search and rescue, or virtual characters in the expanding gaming industry or for serious games, sometimes representing other people through on-line social and interactive meeting places. Although these broad areas have their own unique research challenges, there is a clear commonality to be addressed in the investigation of how people interact with agents, whether they have physical or virtual embodiments, or represent remote people or an AI algorithm, a commonality that requires explicit consideration.

The Second International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction (HAI 2014) aims to be the premier interdisciplinary venue for discussing and disseminating state-of-the-art research and results that have implications across conventional interaction boundaries including robots, software agents and digitally-mediated human-human communication. HAI will gather researchers from fields spanning engineering, computer science, psychology and sociology, and will cover diverse topics, including human-robot interaction, affective computing, computer-supported collaborative work, gaming and serious games, artificial intelligence, and more.

The theme of this year’s conference is “equations and theories relating robots, avatars, and virtual characters.”

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to,

design of Human-Agent Interaction, including quantitative and qualitative results
theoretical models of Human-Agent Interaction
impacts of embodiment (e.g., physical vs digital, human vs animal-like)
experimental methods for Human-Agent Interaction

This includes more targeted results that have implications to the broader human-agent interaction community:

human-robot interaction
human-virtual agent interaction
interaction with smart homes and smart cars
distributed groupware where people have remote embodiments and representations
and more!