Since the first AI-HRI held at the 2014 AAAI Fall Symposium Series, a lot of the presented research and discussions have emphasized how artificial intelligence (AI) developments can benefit human-robot interaction (HRI). This portrays HRI as an application, a source of domain-specific problems to solve, to the AI community. Likewise, this portrays AI as a tool, a source of solutions available for relevant problems, to the HRI community. However, members of the AI-HRI research community will point out that the relationship has a deeper synergy than matchmaking problems and solutions -- there are insights from each field that impact how the other one thinks about the world and performs scientific research. There is no greater opportunity for sharing perspectives at the moment than human-aware AI, which studies how to account for the fact that people are more than a source of data or part of an algorithm. We will explore how AI-HRI can change the way researchers think about human-aware AI, from observation through validation, to make even the algorithmic design process human-aware.

Development of conversational systems is one of the most challenging tasks in natural language processing, and it is especially hard in the case of open-domain dialogue. The main factors that hinder progress in this area are lack of training data and difficulty of automatic evaluation. Thus, to reliably evaluate the quality of such models, one needs to resort to time-consuming and expensive human evaluation. We tackle these problems by organizing the Conversational Intelligence Challenge (ConvAI) -- open competition of dialogue systems. Our goals are threefold: to work out a good design for human evaluation of open-domain dialogue, to grow open-source code base for conversational systems, and to harvest and publish new datasets.

Much virtual ink gets spilled each week enumerating the many horrors that could be ours in an AI-filled world, but top researchers in the field are already thinking ahead and making plans to ensure none of that happens. In particular, the importance of making artificial intelligence "human-aware" has come to be viewed as a top imperative for the field, earning it special status as an official theme of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence taking place this week in New York. "It's crucial that we design smart systems to work well with people," said Harvard professor Barbara Grosz during a panel discussion at the conference on Tuesday. AI should be a complement for human intelligence, not a replacement, Grosz said. As such, an ability to understand who it's interacting with and respond accordingly -- such as by explaining the decisions it makes -- is essential.

Much virtual ink gets spilled each week enumerating the many horrors that could be ours in an AI-filled world, but top researchers in the field are already thinking ahead and making plans to ensure none of that happens. In particular, the importance of making artificial intelligence "human-aware" has come to be viewed as a top imperative for the field, earning it special status as an official theme of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence taking place this week in New York. "It's crucial that we design smart systems to work well with people," said Harvard professor Barbara Grosz during a panel discussion at the conference on Tuesday. Nominate your analytics project today! AI should be a complement for human intelligence, not a replacement, Grosz said.