[meetings] [CFP] Towards Ethical Deception in HRI Workshop @RO-MAN 2026
Silvia Rossi
TED_HRI 2026
Towards Ethical Deception in HRI
Kitakyushu International Conference Center, Kitakyushu, Japan
24-28 August 2024
Workshop website: https://sites.google.com/view/ted-hri
Submission link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ted-hri26
Early-bid deadline for paper submission: 7 May 2026
General deadline for paper submission: 31 May 2026
This workshop will be a half-day event organised in conjunction with the IEEE RO-MAN 2026 conference, held in Kitakyushu, Japan.
This workshop focuses on the ethical and pro-social use of deceptive and persuasive behaviours in social robotics, exploring how robots deployed in healthcare, educational, caregiving, and domestic environments can strategically employ techniques such as white lies, intentional errors, and selective information omission to improve user well-being and interaction effectiveness. As social robots evolve beyond reactive dialogue systems toward socio-emotionally aware agents capable of addressing users' broader psychological needs, the deliberate and context-sensitive use of deception emerges as a nuanced but potentially valuable behavioural strategy. At the same time, the workshop critically engages with the controversies surrounding robot deception, acknowledging the lack of scholarly consensus on its definition and the ethical boundaries that must govern its application. By bringing together researchers from multiple disciplines, the workshop aims to advance a shared understanding of how robots might ethically leverage deceptive and persuasive mechanisms to improve human well-being without exploiting human vulnerabilities.
Submission & List of Topics
The workshop is open to a broad audience from academia and industry researching social robotics, robot ethics, cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy of technology. The workshop aims to attract an interdisciplinary audience that includes academics, industry researchers, designers, and policy-makers interested in exploring the integration of deceptive techniques in design-centred and ethics-centred HRI. By fostering dialogue across disciplinary and methodological boundaries, the workshop seeks to promote a shared understanding of how social robots might responsibly employ complex behavioural strategies in human-centred contexts, such as education, healthcare, and service.
We will invite authors to submit scientific papers ranging from 2 to 6 pages, with additional space for references and appendices. We will accept different types of works, including preliminary findings, case studies, position papers, surveys, and cutting-edge research on the workshop topics. Accepted papers will have short oral presentations.
We will encourage authors of the accepted papers to present a video or to demonstrate their work.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
Pro-social deception.
Anti-social robot deception.
Ethical (RoboEthics) implications of deceptive robotics.
Creating deceptive robots. Mechanisms of deceptive robots.
Applications of deceptive robots.
Machine learning and deceptive robots.
Counter-deception and resilience (both for humans and robots)
Who decides who can be deceived (and when)?
Responsible development of robotic deception, including participatory design for the development of appropriate deceptive behaviours
The deception objection debate: Are emotionally expressive robots deceptive?
Submission Guidelines
Authors should submit their papers formatted according to the IEEE two-column format, which is also used for contributions to the main conference. Use the following templates to create the paper and generate or export a PDF file: LaTeX or MS-Word.
Authors need to submit their PDF via EasyChair. Each paper will receive at least two reviews. All papers are reviewed using a single-blind review process: authors declare their names and affiliations in the manuscript for the reviewers to see, but reviewers do not know each other's identities, nor do the authors receive information about who has reviewed their manuscript.
Committees
Kantwon Rogers, Massachusetts Inst. of Technology, Massachusetts, USA
Andres Rosero, George Mason University, Virginia, USA
Alessandra Rossi, University of Naples Federico II, Napoli, Italy
Silvia Rossi, University of Naples Federico II, Napoli, Italy
Henrik Skaug Sætra, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
Alan Wagner, Pennsylvania State University, Pennsylvania, USA
Contact
All questions about submissions should be emailed to alessand...@unina.it