The Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) Symposium has been a successful venue of discussion and collaboration since 2014. During that time, these symposia provided a fertile ground for numerous collaborations and pioneered many discussions revolving around HRI, XAI for HRI, service robots, interactive learning, and more. This unique intersection of expertise, along with the rising interest in robots in mixed human-robot environments, calls for an informed discussion about the future of AI-HRI as a united research community. As such, this year's symposium had no single theme and AI-HRI submissions were encouraged from across disciplines and research interests. Moreover, with the rising interest in AR and VR as part of an AI-HRI system, along with the difficulties in running physical experiments during the pandemic, this year we specifically encouraged researchers to submit works that do not include a physical robot in their evaluation, but promote HRI research in general.

A new generation of increasingly autonomous and self-learning systems, which we call embodied systems, is about to be developed. When deploying these systems into a real-life context we face various engineering challenges, as it is crucial to coordinate the behavior of embodied systems in a beneficial manner, ensure their compatibility with our human-centered social values, and design verifiably safe and reliable human-machine interaction. We are arguing that raditional systems engineering is coming to a climacteric from embedded to embodied systems, and with assuring the trustworthiness of dynamic federations of situationally aware, intent-driven, explorative, ever-evolving, largely non-predictable, and increasingly autonomous embodied systems in uncertain, complex, and unpredictable real-world contexts. We are also identifying a number of urgent systems challenges for trustworthy embodied systems, including robust and human-centric AI, cognitive architectures, uncertainty quantification, trustworthy self-integration, and continual analysis and assurance.

Increasing complexity comes from some factors including uncertainty, ambiguity, inconsistency, multiple dimensionalities, increasing the number of effective factors and relation between them. Some of these features are common among most real-world problems which are considered complex and dynamic problems. In other words, since the data and relations in real world applications are usually highly complex and inaccurate, modeling real complex systems based on observed data is a challenging task especially for large scale, inaccurate and non stationary datasets. Therefore, to cover and address these difficulties, the existence of a computational system with the capability of extracting knowledge from the complex system with the ability to simulate its behavior is essential. In other words, it is needed to find a robust approach and solution to handle real complex problems in an easy and meaningful way [1]. Hard computing methods depend on quantitative values with expensive solutions and lack of ability to represent the problem in real life due to some uncertainties. In contrast, soft computing approaches act as alternative tools to deal with the reasoning of complex problems [2]. Using soft computing methods such as fuzzy logic, neural network, genetic algorithms or a combination of these allows achieving robustness, tractable and more practical solutions. Generally, two types of methods are used for analyzing and modeling dynamic systems including quantitative and qualitative approaches.

Meanwhile, applications of RL have only begun to expand beyond these constrained game environments to more diverse and complex real-world environments such as chip design [86], chemical reaction optimization [133] and performing long-term recommendations [45]. To further progress towards these more complex real-world environments, greater alleviation of challenges currently facing RL (e.g., generalization, robustness, scalability, and safety) is needed [7, 27, 72, 108]. Moreover, we can expect that as the complexity of environments increases, the difficulty in alleviating these challenges will increase as well [27]. For the purpose of this paper, we broadly define known RL challenges as either an aptitude or alignment problem. Aptitude encompasses challenges concerned with being able to learn. Aptitude includes ideas such as robustness, the ability of RL to perform a task (e.g., asymptotic performance) and generalize within/between environments of similar complexity; scalability, the ability of RL to scale up to more complex environment; and aptness, the rate at which a RL algorithm can learn to solve a problem or achieve a desired performance level. Likewise, alignment encompasses challenges concerned with learning as intended [7, 27, 72]. The hypothetical paperclip agent [18] is a classic example of misalignment.

Probabilistic model checking has been developed for verifying systems that have stochastic and nondeterministic behavior. Given a probabilistic system, a probabilistic model checker takes a property and checks whether or not the property holds in that system. For this reason, probabilistic model checking provide rigorous guarantees. So far, however, probabilistic model checking has focused on propositional models where a state is represented by a symbol. On the other hand, it is commonly required to make relational abstractions in planning and reinforcement learning. Various frameworks handle relational domains, for instance, STRIPS planning and relational Markov Decision Processes. Using propositional model checking in relational settings requires one to ground the model, which leads to the well known state explosion problem and intractability. We present pCTL-REBEL, a lifted model checking approach for verifying pCTL properties of relational MDPs. It extends REBEL, a relational model-based reinforcement learning technique, toward relational pCTL model checking. PCTL-REBEL is lifted, which means that rather than grounding, the model exploits symmetries to reason about a group of objects as a whole at the relational level. Theoretically, we show that pCTL model checking is decidable for relational MDPs that have a possibly infinite domain, provided that the states have a bounded size. Practically, we contribute algorithms and an implementation of lifted relational model checking, and we show that the lifted approach improves the scalability of the model checking approach.

Humans ability to transfer knowledge through teaching is one of the essential aspects for human intelligence. A human teacher can track the knowledge of students to customize the teaching on students needs. With the rise of online education platforms, there is a similar need for machines to track the knowledge of students and tailor their learning experience. This is known as the Knowledge Tracing (KT) problem in the literature. Effectively solving the KT problem would unlock the potential of computer-aided education applications such as intelligent tutoring systems, curriculum learning, and learning materials' recommendation. Moreover, from a more general viewpoint, a student may represent any kind of intelligent agents including both human and artificial agents. Thus, the potential of KT can be extended to any machine teaching application scenarios which seek for customizing the learning experience for a student agent (i.e., a machine learning model). In this paper, we provide a comprehensive and systematic review for the KT literature. We cover a broad range of methods starting from the early attempts to the recent state-of-the-art methods using deep learning, while highlighting the theoretical aspects of models and the characteristics of benchmark datasets. Besides these, we shed light on key modelling differences between closely related methods and summarize them in an easy-to-understand format. Finally, we discuss current research gaps in the KT literature and possible future research and application directions.

Policymakers face a broader challenge of how to view AI capabilities today and where does society stand in terms of those capabilities. This paper surveys AI capabilities and tackles this very issue, exploring it in context of political security in digitally networked societies. We extend the ideas of Information Management to better understand contemporary AI systems as part of a larger and more complex information system. Comprehensively reviewing AI capabilities and contemporary man-machine interactions, we undertake conceptual development to suggest that better information management could allow states to more optimally offset the risks of AI enabled influence and better utilise the emerging capabilities which these systems have to offer to policymakers and political institutions across the world. Hopefully this long essay will actuate further debates and discussions over these ideas, and prove to be a useful contribution towards governing the future of AI.

Estimated to be worth $3T by the end of the decade, per CB Insights' Industry Analyst Consensus, the fashion industry is growing at a fast pace, led by cutting-edge technologies. From robots that sew and cut fabric to AI algorithms that predict style trends, VR mirrors in dressing rooms, shopping off the runway and a number of other innovations show how technology is automating and evolving the industry. In 2016, Google collaborated with online fashion platform Zalando and production company Stinkdigital to launch predictive design engine, Project Muze. The algorithm consisted of a set of aesthetic parameter and trained a neural network to comprehend colours, textures and styles derived from Google Fashion Trends Report and data sourced by Zalando -- to create designs in sync with with style preferences identified by the network. Amazon is taking an algorithmic approach to fashion as well.

The study of generalisation in deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to produce RL algorithms whose policies generalise well to novel unseen situations at deployment time, avoiding overfitting to their training environments. Tackling this is vital if we are to deploy reinforcement learning algorithms in real world scenarios, where the environment will be diverse, dynamic and unpredictable. This survey is an overview of this nascent field. We provide a unifying formalism and terminology for discussing different generalisation problems, building upon previous works. We go on to categorise existing benchmarks for generalisation, as well as current methods for tackling the generalisation problem. Finally, we provide a critical discussion of the current state of the field, including recommendations for future work. Among other conclusions, we argue that taking a purely procedural content generation approach to benchmark design is not conducive to progress in generalisation, we suggest fast online adaptation and tackling RL-specific problems as some areas for future work on methods for generalisation, and we recommend building benchmarks in underexplored problem settings such as offline RL generalisation and reward-function variation.

Recent times are witnessing rapid development in machine learning algorithm systems, especially in reinforcement learning, natural language processing, computer and robot vision, image processing, speech, and emotional processing and understanding. In tune with the increasing importance and relevance of machine learning models, algorithms, and their applications, and with the emergence of more innovative uses cases of deep learning and artificial intelligence, the current volume presents a few innovative research works and their applications in real world, such as stock trading, medical and healthcare systems, and software automation. The chapters in the book illustrate how machine learning and deep learning algorithms and models are designed, optimized, and deployed. The volume will be useful for advanced graduate and doctoral students, researchers, faculty members of universities, practicing data scientists and data engineers, professionals, and consultants working on the broad areas of machine learning, deep learning, and artificial intelligence.