Dear all,

I hope this email finds you well.

For our next reading group session on Wednesday, December 11th, we are excited to welcome our guest speaker, Tamlin Love [1].

The session will take place from 14:30 to 16:00. As always, those attending remotely can join via Zoom. The meeting link can be found in the shared Google Sheet.

This will be our last reading group for 2024. I want to take a moment to thank all of you for your participation and for volunteering to present in our reading group. I wish you a joyful holiday season and a fantastic start to 2025!

Speaking of 2025, due to upcoming deadlines in January, we've decided to pause the reading group for January. We'll resume as usual in February 2025 with the Causal Inference series. Good luck with your submissions--may the reviewers ever be in your favor!

Below, you'll find the abstract for Tamlin's talk:

Title: Challenges in Robotics and Human-Robot Interaction Domains for Explainability

Abstract: "Explainability has been identified as an important tool in human-robot interaction (HRI) for improving understanding of robots and thus increasing trust, acceptance, and usability. However, HRI domains pose challenges to explainability that differ from most typical XAI scenarios. In this talk, I will discuss the wider challenges facing explainable HRI, how we have started to tackle generating counterfactual explanations in these scenarios using causal models, and some specific challenges that arise from this approach, through the lens of a domestic home assistance robot for older adults."

Looking forward to seeing you all soon! Let me know if there's anything I missed.

Cheers, Nektarios

Links: ------ [1] https://tamlinlove.github.io/