The HRI conference is proud to announce the availability of a bus tour to three outstanding research laboratories on March 1st, 2010. We will visit:

• Asada Synergistic Intelligence Project, ERATO, JST (inside campus of Osaka Univ.) – http://www.jeap.org/web/
• Hosoda Laboratory, Osaka University – http://www.robot.ams.eng.osaka-u.ac.jp/index-e.html
• Augmented Living for Occupant Comfort & Energy Saving, Osaka University
• Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories, Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International – http://www.irc.atr.jp/en/
• Computational Neuroscience Laboratories, Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International – http://www.cns.atr.jp/indexE.html

The preliminary schedule is:

• 9:00 – Start of the tour, the meeting point is at the Business Innovation Center Osaka
• 10:00~11:30 – Technical tour at Osaka Univiversity
• 12:30~13:30 – Lunch (Tenpura and Udon) at Osaka, 美々卯（mimiu). A vegetarian menu is available. The lunch is included in the registration fee.
• 14:30~16:00 – Technical tour at ATR.
• 17:30 – End of the tour, the bus will arrive at the Business Innovation Center Osaka

To request funding, please send the following information to hri.studentvolunteer@gmail.com

(1) Provide:

1. Your Name,
2. Your Affiliation (name and address of college/university),
3. Your Contact Information (email address and telephone number(s)).

(2) Indicate:

1. whether you are a part-time or full-time student, and include the name of your faculty advisor with email and telephone contact information;
2. whether or not you are a (co)author of a paper or a late-breaking report at HRI10;
3. if you are receiving or requesting funding from the Young Researchers Workshop on 2 March 2010
4. Please include information about your area of study.

(3) A statement of your requested funding amount and a brief justification of your funding needs (250 words maximum).

Note that you do not have to have an accepted paper/poster at HRI10 to be considered for financial support. The deadline for the information submission is February 1, 2010.

Student Volunteers Co-Chairs

Min Kyung Lee
Carnegie Mellon University

Laurel Riek
University of Cambridge

• Cognitive Analysis Methods Applied to Human-Robot Interaction – Organizers: Julie A. Adams and Robin R. Murphy, (half day tutorial)
• What Do Collaborations with the Arts Have to Say about HRI? – Organizers: William D. Smart, Annamaria Pileggi, Leila Takayama, (full day workshop)
• Interaction Science Perspective on HRI: Designing Robot Morphology – Organizers: Angel P. del Pobil, S. Shyam Sundar, (half day workshop)
• Learning and Adaptation of Humans in HRI – Organizers: Hiroshi Ishiguro, Robin R. Murphy, Tatsuya Nomura, (full day workshop)
• HRI Pioneers Workshop 2010 – Organizers: Kate Tsui, Henriette Cramer, Osawa Hirotaka, Min Kyung Lee, Laurel Riek, Satoru Satake, Kristen Stubbs, Ja-Young Sung, (full day workshop)

You can register for workshops and tutorials at https://www.regonline.com/hri_10_2010_human_robot_interaction_conference.

Abstract

A growing number of scholars have suggested that gestural communication may have been especially important in the early stages of language origins. Of special interest in this debate is the communication of other primates, especially those most closely related to humans, the great apes. The aim of this talk is to explore the interrelations between instrumental actions, action understanding and gesture generation in humans and other apes. In doing so, I will contrast the similarities and differences in the use and comprehension of gestures in humans and apes. Like humans, apes use gestures flexibly and they can even learn new gestures. Unlike humans, however, imitative learning does not seem to be the main mechanism underlying gesture acquisition in great apes. Instead apes seem to learn many of their gestures in social interaction with others via processes of ontogenetic ritualization by means of which instrumental actions are transformed into gestures. Like humans, apes can extract information about the goals contained in the actions of others but there is much less evidence that they also grasp some of the representational properties of certain kinds of gestures and the communicative intentions behind them.

Bio

Josep Call is co-founder and director of the Wolfgang Köhler Primate Research Center (WKPRC) at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) in Leipzig, Germany, and a senior scientist at the department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology of the MPI-EVA. The WKPRC is the only center worldwide dedicated to the comparative study of the cognition of all four nonhuman great apes. He holds a Bachelors degree in Psychology from the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona and Masters and Doctorate degrees from Emory University. Prior to joining the MPI-EVA, he was a lecturer at the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Liverpool. He has published two books and nearly two hundred articles and book chapters on the behavior and cognition of apes and other animals and has presented his work on numerous occasions at international. He is currently the associate editor of the Journal of Comparative Psychology and a member of the editorial board of several other academic journals.