About ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction

ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI)

What this record actually is

This record describes the proceedings of the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, shortened to HRI. It is a conference proceedings series, not a journal. HRI is an annual conference, held for the first time in 2006, at which researchers present peer-reviewed work on how people and robots interact. Each edition produces archival proceedings, published through the Association for Computing Machinery and also carried in IEEE's library channels, containing the full papers accepted for that year, together with companion material for late-breaking reports, short contributions, demonstrations, videos and workshops.

The Journals World record names IEEE Computer Society as publisher and lists the ISSN 2167-2148, an H-index of 92 and an SJR of 0.634. The publisher label needs context, and the context is the most important identifying fact about this venue: HRI is a joint undertaking of two societies. The conference is sponsored by the ACM special interest groups on computer-human interaction (SIGCHI) and artificial intelligence (SIGAI), together with the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS). The 2026 edition states that sponsorship explicitly, and the dual ACM and IEEE presence explains both the dual-library publication and why different catalogues foreground different publishers for the same series. The correct description is a jointly sponsored ACM/IEEE conference, whichever single publisher name a given record displays.

Human-robot interaction is an inherently multidisciplinary field, and HRI is its principal dedicated conference. The conference's own description lists its roots in robotics, psychology, cognitive science, human-computer interaction, human factors, artificial intelligence, organisational behaviour and anthropology. That is not a courtesy list. A paper about how a robot should approach a seated person, how trust forms in a human-robot team, or how a social robot supports children in therapy can only be judged by reviewers who collectively cover engineering, experimental method and social science — and HRI's programme structure is built to assemble exactly that mixture.

Identity at a glance

• Full name: ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction.
• Short name: HRI, written with the year, for example HRI 2025 or HRI '26.
• Record publisher: IEEE Computer Society (United States), as shown on the Journals World record; the conference itself is a joint ACM/IEEE undertaking.
• Sponsors, as stated for HRI 2026: ACM SIGCHI, ACM SIGAI and the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society.
• ISSN shown on the record: 2167-2148.
• Indicators shown on the record: H-index 92; SJR 0.634.
• Subject focus shown on the record: Computer Science; Engineering — with the substantive scope extending into psychology, cognitive science, human factors and the social sciences.
• First edition: 2006, Salt Lake City, Utah, United States, 2 to 3 March 2006, under the title Conference on Human-Robot Interaction and the sponsorship description ACM SIGCHI/SIGART.
• Cadence: annual, usually in March.
• Scale in early reporting: described as highly selective, with acceptance rates for full papers generally in the region of one in four, and attendance in the hundreds.

History: a field gives itself a conference

Before 2006, human-robot interaction research was scattered. Roboticists published in robotics venues, psychologists in psychology venues, and human-computer interaction researchers in HCI venues, and no single archival meeting required a paper to satisfy all of those audiences at once. Related meetings existed — most notably the IEEE symposium on robot and human interactive communication, founded in the early 1990s — but the specific idea of a conference whose centre of gravity is the interaction itself, studied with the methods of both engineering and the behavioural sciences, was what the founders of HRI set out to build.

The first edition, HRI 2006, met in Salt Lake City, Utah, on 2 to 3 March 2006, and its proceedings were published as the proceedings of the first ACM SIGCHI/SIGART conference on human-robot interaction. SIGART was the ACM group whose remit later appears in the conference's sponsorship through SIGAI. Alongside that first conference, an NSF-sponsored workshop for young researchers in HRI was held on 1 March 2006 in the same city, assembling fifteen graduate students from five countries across computer science, psychology, engineering and the arts. The workshop report is a revealing founding document: its recommendations for growing the field were a stable shared robotics platform for research, a multidisciplinary community infrastructure, and shared reference material to help researchers understand each other's disciplines. Community-building was, from the first week, a stated purpose of the enterprise and not a side effect.

From that start, HRI settled into an annual March rhythm and a rotating international geography. HRI 2007 met in the Washington, DC area; 2008 in Amsterdam; 2009 in San Diego; 2010 in Osaka; 2011 in Lausanne; 2012 in Boston; 2013 in Tokyo; 2014 in Bielefeld; 2015 in Portland, Oregon; and 2016 in Christchurch, New Zealand — the edition whose site styled it the eleventh annual conference. The alternation between North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region mirrors the distribution of the research community and was established within the first five editions.

The conference matured in form as the field matured. What began as a two-day meeting grew into a multi-day programme with workshops and tutorials on the opening days, a doctoral and student community, late-breaking and short contribution streams, an alt.HRI stream for provocative or unconventional work, video and demonstration sessions, and an associated journal, ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction, which serves the field's longer-form archival needs and is a separate publication from these proceedings. Editions from 2020 onward also had to absorb the disruption of the pandemic period: HRI 2020, 2021 and 2022 were held as virtual conferences, before the series returned to in-person meetings in Stockholm in 2023, Boulder, Colorado in 2024, Melbourne, Australia in 2025 and Edinburgh, Scotland in 2026. HRI 2025 was the twentieth annual edition, held 3 to 6 March 2025 in Melbourne with the theme Robots for a Sustainable World. HRI 2026 was billed as the twenty-first edition, in Edinburgh from 16 to 19 March 2026, with the theme HRI Empowering Society, and HRI 2027 has been announced for Santa Clara, California.

Scope: studying the interaction, not only the robot

HRI's scope is best understood by its recurring subject matter rather than by a topic list alone. Technical work covers robot behaviour generation, dialogue and natural-language interaction, non-verbal communication including gaze, gesture and movement, robot learning from people, shared autonomy and teleoperation, and the design of robot morphology and embodiment. Empirical work covers user studies of robots in laboratories and in the field, measurement of trust, acceptance, engagement and workload, longitudinal studies of robots in homes, schools, hospitals and workplaces, and studies of special populations including children, older adults and people receiving therapy or care. Design work covers interaction design methods, prototyping, and critical and speculative approaches. Theoretical and ethical work covers frameworks for understanding social interaction with machines, and the responsibilities that follow when robots act in human spaces.

The HRI 2027 call themes, as summarised in conference listings, show the same structure in modern language: interpersonal constructs including emotional, social and behavioural aspects, affect recognition and engagement; teams, collaboration and communication with robots, including coordination, shared goals and task-based interaction; and special populations covering learning, therapy and care. The HRI 2026 theme, HRI Empowering Society, framed the edition around technical, behavioural and design innovations that empower society, with attention to ethical and accessible integration of robots into daily life, to end users, and to avoiding disruption and inequality as robots spread.

A consequence of this scope is that HRI reviews evidence differently from a pure robotics venue. A technically sophisticated robot demonstrated only in simulation, with no human participant and no interaction claim tested, is usually a weak HRI submission, because the conference's central question — what happens between the person and the robot — has not been addressed. Conversely, a modest technical system studied carefully with real users, with honest reporting of failures, can be a strong HRI paper. Review criteria follow the scope: contribution to understanding or improving interaction, rigour of method appropriate to the claim, and clarity about limitations.

Publisher, sponsors and organisational structure

HRI is governed as a conference community. A steering committee provides continuity, and each edition is run by general chairs and programme chairs with a programme committee drawn from across the field's disciplines, supported by associate chairs and reviewers and by chairs for workshops, tutorials, late-breaking work, demonstrations, videos, students and local arrangements. The sponsorship for the modern conference, stated for HRI 2026, is ACM SIGCHI and ACM SIGAI together with the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. That combination is the institutional form of the field's interdisciplinarity: the ACM groups bring human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence, and the IEEE society brings robotics engineering.

Publication is dual-channel. HRI 2025's call states that full papers are published in the conference proceedings and archived in both the ACM Digital Library and the IEEE Xplore Digital Library. Dual archiving is unusual enough to be worth stating plainly for librarians and indexers: the same proceedings content is intentionally present in both libraries because the conference belongs to both organisations, and duplicate appearance across those two libraries is a feature of the sponsorship arrangement, not evidence of duplicate publication by the authors.

As with other conference series, there is no permanent editorial office. The current edition's official site, under humanrobotinteraction.org with a year-specific address for each edition, carries the call, the committee, the submission system details and the contact points. Queries about a past edition's proceedings are best directed to the digital libraries; queries about an upcoming submission belong to that edition's chairs.

Proceedings, ISSN and citation practice

The ISSN shown on this record, 2167-2148, identifies the proceedings series for cataloguing. Individual papers carry DOIs through the publishing libraries, and a sound citation gives authors, title, the conference name and year, and the DOI, with pages as assigned. HRI companion proceedings — late-breaking reports, short contributions, extended abstracts, workshop and alt.HRI material — are distinct from the main full-paper proceedings for the same year, and catalogues do not always group them identically. A reader searching for a specific item should establish which stream it appeared in, because that determines which volume and library record holds it.

The naming history also affects searching. The 2006 proceedings were titled for an ACM SIGCHI/SIGART conference, while later editions use the ACM/IEEE International Conference wording. Bibliographic databases reconcile those titles into one series, but a manual search that uses only the modern title can miss the earliest volumes. Similarly, the field's journal, ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction, is sometimes confused with these proceedings because the names overlap; the journal has its own ISSN, its own editors and rolling publication, and it is not a volume of this series.

Peer review and programme structure

HRI is selective and uses a two-stage review model for full papers. HRI 2025's call describes the conference as highly selective, with a rigorous two-stage review that includes an expert programme committee meeting at which papers are extensively discussed, and states that submissions are expected to be mature, polished and detailed accounts of cutting-edge research, presented in camera-ready style. In practical terms, authors should expect an initial round of reviews, an opportunity structure defined by that year's call, and a committee discussion in which a paper's fate is argued by people who have read both the paper and the reviews — a process closer to a journal's editorial board discussion than to a simple averaging of scores.

Full papers at HRI 2025 were limited to eight camera-ready pages including figures and excluding references, and accepted full papers were presented in oral sessions. Those figures are edition-specific and must be rechecked for any later year, but they indicate the expected density: an HRI full paper is a complete study, not an extended abstract. Alongside full papers, the programme offers late-breaking reports and short contributions for smaller or newer results, alt.HRI for work that challenges the field's assumptions, demonstrations and videos for systems that must be seen to be judged, workshops and tutorials on the opening days, and structured opportunities for students and newcomers, including volunteering and student-oriented sessions.

The calendar runs well ahead of the March conference. For HRI 2025, abstracts were due on 24 September 2024, with the conference the following March — meaning a submission is prepared in the autumn, reviewed over the winter and presented in early spring. Authors who want an HRI paper should therefore treat the preceding summer as the period in which the study must be finished and written, and should watch the current edition's site from mid-year onward for that edition's exact deadlines and policies on anonymity, supplementary material and ethics review of human-participant research.

Ethics deserves a separate sentence in this venue. Because so much HRI work involves human participants — including children and patients — submissions are expected to describe consent, institutional review and participant protection as applicable to their setting, and reviewers treat missing or careless ethics reporting as a substantive weakness rather than a formatting fault.

Indexing, indicators and standing

The record's indicators, H-index 92 and SJR 0.634, come from Scopus-based serial listings. For a conference that began only in 2006, an H-index of 92 indicates a substantial body of heavily cited work, reflecting how quickly human-robot interaction grew from a niche into a field with industrial and clinical applications. As with every series-level indicator, the figure aggregates two decades of papers and cannot predict the reception of any one paper; and SJR should be compared only within the same subject category and year.

Archiving in both the ACM Digital Library and IEEE Xplore gives HRI papers unusually broad discoverability for a conference series, and the proceedings are ingested by the standard computer-science bibliographies and citation indexes that cover those libraries. Authors needing a specific index for institutional reporting should verify the edition and stream they published in, since companion and workshop material may be treated differently from the main proceedings.

Qualitatively, HRI's standing is that of a field's flagship meeting: it is described in its own calls as the premier venue for innovations in human-robot interaction and as the annual conference for basic and applied HRI research, where researchers from across the world present their best work. Its twenty-year continuity, its joint sponsorship by the leading computing and robotics societies, and its deliberate cultivation of students and new entrants all support that description.

For authors: preparing an HRI submission

Start from the interaction claim. An HRI paper should be able to state, in its first pages, what it teaches the field about people interacting with robots — a finding, a method, a system capability demonstrated with people, or a design insight supported by evidence. Papers that lead with an algorithm and treat the human as an afterthought are routinely advised, in community guidance, that they belong at a robotics or machine-learning venue instead. The venue decision is part of the research design: if the study involves participants, the protocol, measures and analysis should be designed before data collection, not reconstructed afterwards.

Match evidence to claim. Claims about real robots need real-robot evidence; claims about long-term use need longitudinal evidence or must be narrowed; claims about a population need participants from that population or must be presented as preliminary. Report failures and limitations: in a field where systems meet unpredictable human behaviour, a paper with no reported failure is less credible, not more. Use the current edition's official template and page limit exactly, follow its anonymity policy for review copies, and treat supplementary video as evidence to be curated, not as a substitute for a self-contained paper.

Consider the entry points around the main track. A workshop at HRI can be the right home for a position paper or an early study; late-breaking reports suit work that is genuinely recent; demonstrations and videos suit systems whose contribution is experiential; and student programmes exist precisely for researchers new to the field. Many established HRI researchers entered through those side doors before publishing a full paper, and programme chairs regard that pathway as normal.

On charges and fees: conference registration and any publication-related charges are set per edition by the organising committee under ACM and IEEE policies, and they change between editions and between in-person and virtual formats. No standing tariff for this series could be verified in a form that would make quoting a figure responsible, so this profile states none, and readers should use the current edition's registration pages.

Relationship to neighbouring venues and publications

HRI's neighbours include the IEEE symposium on robot and human interactive communication (RO-MAN), which began earlier and has a somewhat more robotics-centred tradition; the International Conference on Social Robotics; and the many robotics, HCI and artificial-intelligence conferences at which interaction work also appears. Within that landscape, HRI is distinguished by insisting that both sides of the interaction be taken seriously in the same review process. Its associated journal, ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction, provides the longer archival form for the same community, and conference papers are commonly extended there. None of those venues is a volume of this series, and this series is not an edition of any of them — a distinction that matters for citation counts and for library holdings.

Frequently asked questions

• Is HRI a journal? No. It is an annual conference, and this record covers its proceedings series. The field's journal is ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction, a separate publication.
• When was the first HRI? In 2006, in Salt Lake City, Utah, on 2 to 3 March.
• Who sponsors HRI? ACM SIGCHI and ACM SIGAI together with the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, as stated for HRI 2026. The first edition was described as an ACM SIGCHI/SIGART conference.
• Which ISSN belongs to this record? 2167-2148, as shown on the Journals World record.
• Why does the record name IEEE Computer Society if ACM also publishes HRI? Because the conference is a joint ACM/IEEE undertaking; different catalogues foreground different partners. Full papers are archived in both the ACM Digital Library and IEEE Xplore, as the HRI 2025 call states.
• How selective is it? HRI describes itself as highly selective with a rigorous two-stage review; full-paper acceptance has historically been in the region of one in four submissions.
• When is it held? Annually, usually in March. HRI 2025 was in Melbourne, 3 to 6 March 2025; HRI 2026 in Edinburgh, 16 to 19 March 2026.
• What indicators does the record show? H-index 92 and SJR 0.634, from Scopus-based listings.
• Are fees stated here? No standing tariff was verified, so no fee figure is given; consult the current edition's official registration pages.

Verification notes

This profile is based on the Journals World record for the series (publisher, ISSN, subject areas and indicators), on the published record of the first edition in Salt Lake City in 2006 and the accompanying young researchers workshop report, on edition listings for HRI 2006 to 2016 and 2019 to 2027, on the HRI 2025 call for papers (twentieth edition, Melbourne, theme, page limit, two-stage review and dual-library archiving) and on the stated sponsorship and theme for HRI 2026 (twenty-first edition, Edinburgh). Edition-specific facts are dated in the text. Sponsorship is stated as given for the recent editions; the earliest edition used the SIGART name, as recorded in its proceedings title.