CUI 2023 is delighted to hosted five topical workshops at the conference this year. Attendance at workshops requires conference and workshop registration prior to the conference. Each workshop may have its own criteria for attendance (e.g., the submission of a position paper), thus you are advised to check details posted by workshop organisers in advance of the conference.

WTF 2023: Working with Trouble and Failures in Conversation between Humans and Robots

Wednesday 19th July, 09:30–17:00 • Workshop Website

In order to carry out human-robot collaborative tasks efficiently, robots have to be able to communicate with their human counter- parts. In many applications, speech interfaces are deployed as a way to empower robots with the ability to communicate. Despite the progress made in speech recognition and (multi-modal) dialogue systems, such interfaces continue to be brittle in a number of ways and the experience of the failure of such interfaces is common- place amongst roboticists. Surprisingly, a rigorous and complete analysis of communicative failures is still missing, and the techni- cal literature is positively skewed towards the success and good performance of speech interfaces. In order to address this blind spot and investigate failures in conversations between humans and robots, an interdisciplinary effort is necessary. This workshop aims to raise awareness of said blind spot and provide a platform for discussing communicative troubles and failures in human-robot interactions and potentially related failures in non-robotic speech interfaces. We aim to bring together researchers studying commu- nication in different fields, to start a scrupulous investigation into communicative failures, to begin working on a taxonomy of such failures, and enable a preliminary discussion on possible mitigating strategies. This workshop intends to be a venue where participants can freely discuss the failures they have encountered, to positively and constructively learn from them.

Organised by Frank Förster, Marta, Romeo, Patrick Holthaus, Birthe Nesset and Maria Jose (Marisé) Galvez Trigo and Christian Dondrup and Joel E Fischer.

Designing Conversational User Interfaces for Older Adults

Wednesday 19th July, 09:00–13:00 • Workshop Website

We are concurrently witnessing two significant shifts: voice and chat-based conversational user interfaces (CUIs) are becoming ubiquitous, and older people are becoming a very large demographic group. However, despite the recent increase in research activity within fields such as CUI, older adults continue to be underrepresented as CUI users both in research and in the design of commercial products. Therefore, the overarching aim of this workshop is to increase the momentum for research that centers on older adults as CUI users. For this, we plan to create an interdisciplinary space that brings together researchers, designers, practitioners, and users, to discuss and share challenges, principles, and strategies for designing CUIs for the ageing population. We thus welcome contributions of empirical studies, theories, design, and evaluation of CUIs for older adults. Through this, we aim to grow the community of CUI researchers across disciplinary boundaries (human-computer interaction, voice and language technologies, geronto-technologies, information studies, etc.) that are engaged in the shared goal of ensuring that older adults are not marginalized or excluded from the design of CUIs.

Organised by Sayan Sarcar, Cosmin Munteanu, Jaisie Sin, Christina Wei, and Sergio Sayago.

Participatory Design for Whom? Designing Conversational User Interfaces for Sensitive Settings and Vulnerable Populations

Wednesday 19th July, 09:00–12:30 • Workshop Website

Conversational User Interfaces (CUIs) are becoming increasingly applied in a broad range of sensitive settings to address the needs and struggles of vulnerable or marginalized users. Sensitive settings include, for instance, CUIs mediating the communication difficulties of people with dementia or supporting refugees to cope with new cultural practices as a chatbot on a government website. While researchers are increasingly designing CUIs for such sensitive settings, methods and co-design approaches to address vulnerable user groups’ highly sensitive needs and struggles are sparse in research thus far. This workshop aims to explore how we can design CUIs for and in sensitive settings with vulnerable users in mind through the co-design process. We aim to establish a working definition of vulnerability, sensitive settings, and how practice-oriented design of CUIs can be inclusive of diverse users.

Organised by Maarten Houben, Nena van As, Nitin Sawhney, David Unbehaun, and Minha Lee.

Is CUI Design Ready Yet? A Workshop on Community Practices and Gaps in CUI Design & Resource Development

Wednesday 19th July, 09:00–12:30 • Workshop Website

As CUIs become more prevalent in both academic research and the commercial market, it becomes more essential to design usable and adoptable CUIs. While research has been growing on the methods for designing CUIs for commercial use, there has been little discussion on overall community practice of developing design resources to aid in practical CUI design. The aim of this workshop therefore is to bring the CUI community together to discuss the current practices for developing tools and resources for practical CUI design, the adoption (or non-adoption) of these tools and resources, and how these resources are utilized in the training and education of new CUI designers entering the field. This workshop will bring together all parts of the CUI community to have meaningful discussions on how CUI design resources are currently developed, and how we can improve these resources and tools to aid in their adoption in practical CUI design, and CUI academic & industry design training.

Organised by Christine Murad, Cosmin Munteanu, Benjamin R Cowan, Leigh Clark, Martin Porcheron, Joel E Fischer, Heloisa Candello, and Raina Langevin.

From C-3PO to HAL: Opening The Discourse About The Dark Side of Multi-Modal Social Agents

Wednesday 19th July, 13:00–17:00 • Workshop Website

The increasing prevalence of communicative agents raises questions about human-agent communication and the impact of such interaction on people’s behavior in society and human-human communication. This workshop aims to address three of those questions: (i) How can we identify malicious design strategies – known as dark patterns – in social agents?; (ii) What is the necessity for and the effects of present and future design features, across different modalities and social contexts, in social agents?; (iii) How can we incorporate the findings of the first two questions into the design of social agents? This workshop seeks to conjoin ongoing discourses of the CUI and wider HCI communities, including recent trends focusing on ethical designs.

Organised by Vino Avanesi, Johanna Rockstroh, Thomas Mildner, Nima Zargham, Leon Reicherts, Maximilian A Friehs, Dimosthenis Kontogiorgos, Nina Wenig, and Rainer Malaka.