Presenting at The 24th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication Kobe International Conference Center, Kobe, Japan (August 31 to September 4, 2015)

Hi!

Though my life is quite chaotic due to the 'relocation' process from Shah Alam back to Melaka, I managed to plan for a short conference getaway to Kobe, Japan.

Of course I did not travel alone (never ever!), I brought my family with me. However, this means that it will be a working-trip for me and a sightseeing one for them.

We safely landed in Osaka-Kansai airport after a 7-hour flight. Alhamdulillah. We stayed in Rokko (a rural part of Kobe) during the trip and it took one-hour of limo-bus ride from Kansai Airport to reach the apartment.

RO-MAN2015

The conference was held at the Kobe Convention Center which is located on Port Island, about 10 minutes from downtown Kobe (Sannomiya). We stayed in Rokko (a rural part of Kobe) during the trip so we had to travel by bus and train to Sannomiya and took the Portliner train to Shiminhiroba Station.

Meet my official photographer for the presentation day:

The theme of IEEE RO-MAN 2015 is "Interaction with Socially Embedded Robots." The IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication ( RO-MAN ) was founded in 1992 by Profs. Toshio Fukuda, Hisato Kobayashi, Hiroshi Harashima and Fumio Hara. RO-MAN2015 is the 24th symposium since 1992.

The title of my presentation (and paper) was 'A Content Validated Tool to Observe Autism Behavior in Child-Robot Interaction'. My session was scheduled on 1st September 2015.

I was the first presenter for the day at 9:00 am. Felt quite disappointed that the conference room was not full, despite RO-MAN being a top conference in the HRI field. Nevertheless, a lot of questions were raised by the audience and I was happy to answer all of them

I had also met Associate Professor Dr Fumihide Tanaka from the University of Tsukuba with his Pepper robot booth. We had met before during the HRI Summer School in Cambridge in August 2013.

Me, Pepper the robot and Dr Tanaka

Overall, I had an awesome experience at ROMAN2015. Met other researchers from Tennessee, China and Japan as well who are also working on projects involving children and robots.

If given the chance, i plan to attend a conference in Australia next year to experience networking with HRI researchers from that part of the world. What about you, what are your plans?

ICRMV 2016 : 18th International Conference on Robotics and Machine Vision

Take care.