<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><font face="arial, sans-serif">Dear Colleagues,</font><div><font face="arial, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div><font face="arial, sans-serif">A gentle reminder about the special issue on </font></div><div><table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" width="523"><tbody><tr><td valign="top" align="left" style="padding:9.35pt"><p class="gmail-m_5625544276436664286gmail-Authors" style="margin:0cm 0cm 6pt;text-align:center"><font face="arial, sans-serif"><b><span lang="EN-US" style="color:black">Robotic Co-workers: Psychological and Cognitive Safety in Human-robot Interactive Social Environments</span></b><b><span lang="EN-US"></span></b></font></p><p class="gmail-m_5625544276436664286gmail-Authors" style="margin:0cm 0cm 6pt;text-align:center"><b><span lang="EN-US"><font face="arial, sans-serif" color="#0000ff">IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Development Systems</font></span></b></p></td></tr></tbody></table></div><div><h1 style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;text-indent:0cm;break-after:avoid;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal"><b style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:small">*Aim and Scope*</b><br></h1><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:10pt"><span lang="EN-US" style="background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial"><font face="arial, sans-serif">In the vision of a cyber-society, humans and robots will closely collaborate to perform given tasks. Robots will automate mundane tasks and let humans focus on higher-order jobs requiring more cognitive skills. In this trend, professional and personal service robots are enabling assistive technologies in human-robot shared workspaces. However, the first and the most challenging issue with respect to deploying developmental and cognitive robots in human populated environments is how to guarantee human physical and cognitive safety in human-robot shared workspaces. Physical safety is about how to maintain a minimum physical distance between robots and humans, which is obviously necessary to deploy autonomous robots in human populated environments, while cognitive safety implies that robots should not cause stress and discomfort to humans when working with or around them. Human risks and their inconveniences when working in an interactive social environment essentially come from unavoidable situations due to robot malfunctioning operations caused by either misunderstanding and misinterpreting information extracted from sensing and perception or failures of path planning and motion control. Furthermore, humans may feel uncomfortable as well as fearful and stressful towards collaborative robots as such robots don’t behave in the natural way of humans with respect to their social situations, contexts, and cultures. It is important to find out a methodological approach for incorporating social signals, cues, and norms into developmental perception, cognitive reasoning and motion planning of the robot control architecture so that the robot is capable of securing human psychological and cognitive safety when interacting and collaborating with humans to perform tasks in human-robot shared workspaces.</font></span></p><h1 style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;text-indent:0cm;break-after:avoid;font-size:10pt;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-caps:small-caps;font-weight:normal"><br></h1><div><font face="arial, sans-serif"><b>*Themes*</b></font></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:10pt"><font face="arial, sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial">The Special Issue aims to address</span><span lang="EN-US"> challenges and methodologies of how to deal with psychological and cognitive safety in order to accelerate deployment and adoption of developmental and cognitive robots into human-robot shared workspaces. The ultimate goals of this special issue are to (1) to address the state-of-the-art research (2) and </span><span lang="EN-US" style="background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial">to generate an avenue for researchers to disseminate their recent research findings in the perspective of </span><span lang="EN-US">psychological and cognitive </span><span lang="EN-US" style="background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial">safety in human-robot shared workplaces.</span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:10pt"><span lang="EN-US" style="background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial"><font face="arial, sans-serif">This special issue targets on all aspects of guaranteeing psychological and cognitive safety in human-robot interactive social environments with, but not limited to, the following topics: </font></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:10pt"></p><ul><li><i style="font-size:11pt;font-family:arial,sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10pt;line-height:14.2667px;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial">Current state-of-the-art</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10pt;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;font-family:arial,sans-serif;line-height:14.2667px">: future perspective of developmental and cognitive robots with concerns of ethics and rules for human psychological and cognitive safety in human-robot shared workspaces.</span><br></li><li><i style="font-size:11pt;font-family:arial,sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10pt;line-height:14.2667px;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial">Perception for psychological and cognitive safety</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10pt;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;font-family:arial,sans-serif;line-height:14.2667px">: capacity and roles of human face and body detection and tracking, human gestures and posture recognition, social cues and signal detection and identification, human-object interaction and human group interaction detection and tracking in satisfying psychological and cognitive safety</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10pt;font-family:arial,sans-serif;line-height:14.2667px">.<span style="background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial"> </span></span><br></li><li><i style="font-size:11pt;font-family:arial,sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10pt;line-height:14.2667px">Cognitive reasoning, motion planning and control</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10pt;font-family:arial,sans-serif;line-height:14.2667px">: methodological development of <span style="background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial">human aware robot navigation, collaborative task performances in dynamic social environments with concerns of psychological and cognitive safety.</span></span><br></li><li><i style="font-size:11pt;font-family:arial,sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10pt;line-height:14.2667px">Machine learning for developmental and cognitive robots</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10pt;font-family:arial,sans-serif;line-height:14.2667px">: using learning by demonstration, reinforcement learning, deep learning, and hierarchical learning to enhance psychological and cognitive safety in human-robot shared workplaces.</span><br></li><li><i style="font-size:11pt;font-family:arial,sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10pt;line-height:14.2667px">Ergonomic studies of developmental and cognitive robots</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10pt;font-family:arial,sans-serif;line-height:14.2667px">: developmental and cognitive factors and benchmarks, evaluation methods, objective and subjective measurement metrics, experiments and validation methods for psychological and cognitive safety.</span><br></li><li><i style="font-size:11pt;font-family:arial,sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10pt;line-height:14.2667px;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial">Applications domains</span></i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:10pt;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;font-family:arial,sans-serif;line-height:14.2667px">: concerns of psychological and cognitive safety when working with developmental and cognitive robots in public places, light industry, digital manufacturing, and transformed manufacturing.</span><br></li></ul><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:10pt"><span lang="EN-US" style="background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:10pt;line-height:14.2667px"><br></span></p><h1 style="margin:0cm 0cm 6pt;text-indent:0cm;break-after:avoid;font-size:10pt;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-caps:small-caps;font-weight:normal"><b style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:small;font-variant-caps:normal">*Submission Guideline*</b><br></h1><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:10pt"><span lang="EN-US"><font face="arial, sans-serif">Manuscripts should be prepared according to the “Information for Authors” of the journal found at <a href="https://cis.ieee.org/publications/t-cognitive-and-developmental-systems/tcds-information-for-authors" target="_blank" style="color:blue">https://cis.ieee.org/publications/t-cognitive-and-developmental-systems/tcds-information-for-authors</a> and submissions should be done through the IEEE TCDS Manuscript center: <a href="https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tcds-ieee" target="_blank" style="color:blue">https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tcds-ieee</a><span style="color:blue"> </span>and please select the category “SI: Psychological and Cognitive Safety”.</font></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:10pt"><span lang="EN-US"><font face="arial, sans-serif"><br></font></span></p><h1 style="margin:0cm 0cm 12pt;text-indent:0cm;break-after:avoid;font-size:10pt;font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-caps:small-caps;font-weight:normal"><b style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:small;font-variant-caps:normal">*Important Dates*</b><br></h1><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:10pt"><font face="arial, sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="color:red">31 </span><span lang="EN-US" style="color:red">December</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color:red"> 2019</span><span lang="EN-US"> – Deadline for manuscript submission</span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:10pt"><font face="arial, sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="color:red">15 Apr 2020</span><span lang="EN-US"> – Notification of authors</span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:10pt"><font face="arial, sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="color:red">15 May 2020 </span><span lang="EN-US">– Deadline for revised manuscripts</span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:10pt"><font face="arial, sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US" style="color:red">15 July 2020</span><span lang="EN-US"> – Final version</span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:10pt"><span lang="EN-US"><font face="arial, sans-serif">For further information, please contact one of the following Guest Editors.</font></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:10pt"><span lang="EN-US"><font face="arial, sans-serif"><br></font></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:10pt"><b style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:small">*Guest Editors*</b><br></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:10pt"><b style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:small"><br></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;font-size:10pt"><b><span lang="EN-US"><font face="arial, sans-serif">Dr. Trung Dung Ngo,</font></span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;font-size:10pt"><span lang="EN-US"><font face="arial, sans-serif">University of Prince Edward Island, Canada,</font></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;font-size:10pt"><font face="arial, sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US"><a href="mailto:tngo@upei.ca" target="_blank" style="color:blue">tngo@upei.ca</a></span><span lang="EN-US"></span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;font-size:10pt"><font face="arial, sans-serif"><br></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;font-size:10pt"><font face="arial, sans-serif"><b><span lang="EN-US">Dr. </span></b><span lang="EN-US"><a href="mailto:http://homepages.laas.fr/rachid/" target="_blank" style="color:blue"><b><span style="color:windowtext;text-decoration-line:none">Rachid Alami</span></b></a></span><span lang="EN-US">,</span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;font-size:10pt"><font face="arial, sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US">LAAS-</span><span lang="EN-US"><span style="color:windowtext;text-decoration-line:none">CNRS</span></span><span lang="EN-US">, University of Toulouse, France </span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;font-size:10pt"><font face="arial, sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US"><a href="mailto:Rachid.Alami@laas.fr" target="_blank" style="color:blue">Rachid.Alami@laas.fr</a></span><span lang="EN-US"></span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;font-size:10pt"><font face="arial, sans-serif"><b><span lang="EN-US"><br></span></b></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;font-size:10pt"><font face="arial, sans-serif"><b><span lang="EN-US">Dr. </span></b><span lang="EN-US"><a href="mailto:http://www.irc.atr.jp/%7Ekanda/" target="_blank" style="color:blue"><b><span style="color:windowtext;text-decoration-line:none">Takayuki Kanda</span></b></a></span><span lang="EN-US">,</span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;font-size:10pt"><span lang="EN-US"><font face="arial, sans-serif">Kyoto University, Japan</font></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;font-size:10pt"><font face="arial, sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US"> </span><span lang="EN-US"><a href="mailto:kanda@i.kyoto-u.ac.jp" target="_blank" style="color:blue">kanda@i.kyoto-u.ac.jp</a></span><span lang="EN-US"></span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;font-size:10pt"><font face="arial, sans-serif"><b><span lang="EN-US"><br></span></b></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial;font-size:10pt"><font face="arial, sans-serif"><b><span lang="EN-US">Dr. </span></b><span lang="EN-US"><a href="mailto:https://www.mie.utoronto.ca/mie/faculty/nejat" target="_blank" style="color:blue"><b><span style="color:windowtext;text-decoration-line:none">Goldie Nejat</span></b></a></span><b><span lang="EN-US"></span></b></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:10pt"><span lang="EN-US"><font face="arial, sans-serif">University of Toronto, Canada</font></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:10pt"><font face="arial, sans-serif"><span lang="EN-US"><a href="mailto:nejat@mie.utoronto.ca" target="_blank" style="color:blue">nejat@mie.utoronto.ca</a></span><span class="gmail-m_5625544276436664286gmail-MsoHyperlink" style="color:blue;text-decoration-line:underline"><span lang="EN-US"></span></span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:10pt"><font face="arial, sans-serif"><b><span lang="EN-US"><br></span></b></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:10pt"><font face="arial, sans-serif"><b><span lang="EN-US">Dr. </span></b><span lang="EN-US"><a href="mailto:http://sourcedb.cas.cn/sourcedb_siat_cas/yw/zjrc/201103/t20110317_3087300.html" target="_blank" style="color:blue"><b><span style="color:windowtext;text-decoration-line:none">Yongsheng Ou</span></b></a></span><span lang="EN-US">,</span></font></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:10pt"><span lang="EN-US"><font face="arial, sans-serif">SIAT, Chinese Academy of Science, China</font></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;font-size:10pt"><span lang="EN-US"><font face="arial, sans-serif"><a href="mailto:ys.ou@siat.ac.cn" target="_blank" style="color:blue">ys.ou@siat.ac.cn</a><span class="gmail-m_5625544276436664286gmail-MsoHyperlink" style="color:blue;text-decoration-line:underline"></span></font></span></p><div><font face="arial, sans-serif"><br clear="all"></font>Sincerely,<div id="gmail-m_5625544276436664286gmail-ftn1"></div></div><div>Trung Ngo</div></div></div></div>