Workshop on Views of the Uncanny Valley

As part of the 2005 IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots this December 5-7 in Tsukuba, Japan there will be a workshop organised by Christian Keysers, Karl MacDorman and Frank Pollick that brings together researchers in neuroscience, perception, cognition and robotics to examine the phenomenon known as the uncanny valley.

A list of the speakers and brief abstracts can be found at:

www.theuncannyvalley.org

and details of the parent conference at:

www.humanoidrobots.org/humanoids2005/

The term "uncanny valley" or "bukimi no tani" in Japanese was coined 35 years ago by Dr. Masahiro Mori, and it stands today as one of the most commonly known design considerations of humanoid robots and synthetic characters. It states that as a robot or synthetic character approaches that of a human there will be a dramatic decrease in its acceptability to observers. The goal of the workshop will be to examine how the perception of human and robot motions are transformed into an appreciation of the events being observed.