IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems
Special Issue on Bio-inspired Social Robot Learning in Home Scenarios

http://www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/wtm/SocialRobotsWorkshop2016/CFP_TCDS_SI_SocialRobots.pdf

CALL FOR PAPERS
There has been considerable progress in robotics in the last years allowing robots to successfully contribute to our society. We can find them from industrial environments, where they are nowadays established, to domestic places, where their presence is steadily rising. The proposed special issue intends to explore the following question: "How well prepared are learning robots to be social actors in daily-life home environments in the near future."

The special issue is therefore not only an opportunity to address this focuses on the latest scientific contributions on bio-inspired learning and social robotics, but also links them with a clear focus to push the presence of robots in people's daily-life environment. Thus, one main goal of the special issue is offering a common foundation for roboticists from different fields of expertise to contribute beyond the current state-of-the-art of learning methods in robotics especially applied to home scenarios and recent developments in assistive robots.

The subjects of the special issue include, but are not limited to:
- Interactive reinforcement learning.
- Policy and reward shaping.
- Neural learning of object affordances and contextual affordances.
- Predictive learning from sensorimotor information.
- Learning understanding of environment ambiguity.
- Learning with hierarchical and deep neural architectures.
- Bootstrapping complex action learning in robots.
- Learning supported by external trainers, by demonstration and imitation.
- Parental scaffolding as a bootstrapping method for learning.

SUBMISSIONS
The special issue is open for all submissions which will be independently peer-reviewed in accordance with IEEE policy. Manuscripts should be prepared according to the "Information for Authors" of the journal, found at http://cis.ieee.org/publications.html, and submitted through the IEEE TCDS Manuscript center under the category: "SI: Social Robots": https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tcds-ieee. Papers submitted must not have been published previously, though they may represent significant extensions of prior work.

IMPORTANT DATES
31 January 2017 - Deadline for manuscript submission.
15 April 2017 - Notification of authors.
15 May 2017 - Deadline for revised manuscripts.
15 June 2017 - Final decisions.

For further information, please contact one of the following guest editors in this order:

Francisco Cruz
Knowledge Technology Institute, University of Hamburg, Germany
cruz@informatik.uni-hamburg.de

Jimmy Baraglia
Emergent Robotics Laboratory, Osaka University, Japan
jimmy.baraglia@ams.eng.osaka-u.ac.jp

Yukie Nagai
Emergent Robotics Laboratory, Osaka University, Japan
yukie@ams.eng.osaka-u.ac.jp

Stefan Wermter
Knowledge Technology Institute, University of Hamburg, Germany
wermter@informatik.uni-hamburg.de