HAI

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to The Seventh International Conference on Human- Agent Interaction (HAI 2019) at the Musubiwaza-kan of Kyoto Sangyo University, at the center of Kyoto-city. Kyoto is the ancient capital of Japan where there are countless temples, shrines and other historically priceless structures. HAI is a venue with an interdisciplinary nature to discuss and disseminate state-of-the-art research on topics that relate to human interactions with a range of agent systems, including physical robots, virtual agents, socially interactive agents, and artificially intelligent agents. HAI focuses on research topics that investigate the core essence of interaction between people and Agents. The viewpoint of Agents not only gives us deep insight into robotics, software agents and humans but also helps us share research findings beyond conventional research boundaries, exploring differences through the implementation of Agents. HAI brings together researchers from engineering, computer science, psychology, cognitive science and sociology.

The theme for HAI 2019 is "Human-Agent Interaction, the Heart of Artificial Intelligence." Due to the rapid progress of deep learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has reached a human or superhuman level in image recognition, games, speech recognition, translation, automatic driving, and many other applications. It can be said that HAI has now become the most exciting target area of AI. We are looking forward to sharing the latest research results of HAI that contribute to elucidate the mechanism of intelligence, implementation reports of groundbreaking HAI that are utilizing cutting-edge AI technology, and advanced research results of the boundary region between HAI and AI such as interactive machine learning and human-AI partnerships.

Two keynote talks are featured: The social psychology of human-agent interaction, from Prof. Jonathan Gratch of USC Institute for Creative Technologies, USA; and Accounting social cognitive mechanisms by the framework of predictive coding and active inference: a synthetic experimental study using robotics interaction platforms from Prof. Jun Tani of Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Japan. Their research provide deeper insights into transcending conventional HAI development strategies in order to provide technological solutions to intractable social problems, and into utilizing neuropsychological mechanisms for social cognition including interaction, intention, free will, and mind. We are very excited to include these highly inspiring talks!