Call for Papers: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Uncertainty Management in Human-Machine Interaction

Call for Papers on Multidisciplinary Approaches to Uncertainty Management in Human-Machine Interaction — IMPU 2026 Special Session  <>
Organizers:


Madalina CROITORU (Univ. Montpellier, France) croitoru@lirmm.fr <mailto:croitoru@lirmm.fr>
Ganesh GOWRISHANKAR (LIRMM CNRS, Montpellier, France) Ganesh.Gowrishankar@lirmm.fr <mailto:Ganesh.Gowrishankar@lirmm.fr> 

Dates: 


Paper submission: 12th of January 2026 
IPMU conference : 15th - 19th of June 2026, Rome, Italy

Format: 14 pages Springer LNCS (see https://www.sbai.uniroma1.it/conferenze/ipmu2026/submission-instructions.php)

Scope and Topics:

Recent advances in robotics and autonomous systems have brought machines increasingly close to human environments, requiring them to act, decide, and communicate under multiple layers of uncertainty. While traditional research in uncertainty management has focused on data, logic, and deduction / inference, human–machine interaction introduces new challenges — uncertainty becomes embodied, social, and affective. Robots and autonomous systems must not only reason about uncertain sensory inputs or incomplete models of the world, but also interpret and adapt to human emotions, intentions, and unpredictable behaviors.

This special session seeks to explore how uncertainty shapes human–machine understanding, from perception and motion planning to social interaction and affective communication. It aims to bring together AI with robotics researchers and specialists in psychology, neuroscience, and social sciences to study how embodied autonomous systems can sense, reason about, and communicate uncertainty in ways that align with human cognition and emotion. 

By extending traditional uncertainty management into embodied and interactive contexts, this session addresses fundamental questions: How can robots express uncertainty in interpretable ways? How can they reason about human affect or intent when cues are ambiguous or incomplete? How can uncertainty be leveraged to build systems that are not only reliable and adaptive but also socially and ethically aware? 

Through this multidisciplinary exchange, the session will foster new frameworks for representing, reasoning with, and communicating uncertainty in embodied interaction, paving the way toward more transparent, trustworthy, and human-aligned autonomous systems.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Managing perceptual and predictive uncertainty in dynamic human environments
Embodied representations of uncertainty in robotic motion and action planning
Communicating and adapting to uncertainty in human–robot collaboration
Emotional and affective uncertainty in human–machine dialogue and interaction
Cognitive architectures for reasoning under uncertainty in social contexts
Trust calibration, transparency, and adaptation in uncertainty-aware robotic systems
Social and ethical implications of uncertainty management in autonomous systems
Evaluation and benchmarking of uncertainty-aware interaction models

—
Prof. Madalina Croitoru,
University of Montpellier

Co-director of IRobot Master Track,
Computer Science, Faculty of Science
Co-head of IDH Research Group, 
Robotics Dept., LIRMM