The Social Robotics, Artificial Intelligence and Multimedia (SoRAIM) multi-disciplinary winter school combined topics of interest to the next generation of social roboticists. Top-level invited speakers introduced and discussed all relevant areas for building socially aware robots that communicate and interact with humans in a shared space. Lectures covered the following topics:
• Speech source localization and separation
• Mapping and visual self-localization
• Social-aware robot navigation
• Tracking and analysis of human behaviour
• Dialog management, natural language understanding, and generation
• Robotic middle-ware and software integration
• Ethics and experimental design
SoRAIM fostered discussion between experts in these fields and exposed students, young researchers and engineers to highly qualified scientists and experts. It will provided opportunities to interact and discuss with several members of the project, as well s for the participants to present their own research in the form of a poster.
The SPRING project is coming to an end in May 2024. Its scientific and technological objectives, described in detail in previous deliverables (shortly: to test a versatile social robotic platform within a hospital and have it perform social activities in a multi-person, dynamic setup) is mostly fulfilled. However, an important element of the project is also to empower the next generation of (young) researchers with concepts and tools to answer tomorrow’s challenges in the field of social robotics. It was therefore decided early on that the end-project workshop should tackle the issue of knowledge and know-how transmission.
The chosen form was that of a winter school, free of charge, so that as many students and young researchers from various horizons (not only technical fields) could attend. In that view, the event, which took place from 19 to 23 February 2024 in Grenoble, France, was successful as it managed to attract 57 participants through the whole week. The attendees were diverse, as was aimed initially, with a breakdown of 50% of PhD students, 20% of young researchers (public sector), 10% of engineers and young researchers (private sector), and 20% of MSc students. Of particular focus, the ratio of women attendees was close to 40%, which is double of the usual in this field. Finally, in terms of geographic spread, attendees came in majority from other European countries (17 countries total), with just below 50% attendees coming from France. Following the school, a satisfaction survey was sent to the attendees in order to better grasp which elements were the most appreciated in view of a longer term objective of the SPRING project to hold this winter school as a serial event.
More information about the SoRAIM winter school is available on our dedicated webpage.
