The quality and impact of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) research rely on scientific rigour and reproducibility as well as the ethical soundness of experiments involving human participants. However, the HRI community currently lacks easy access to resources and common knowledge on experimental design practices and standardised reporting guidelines. Our workshop BPM-HRI: Best practices and methods in HRI research at The International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction 2026 aims to address this gap by fostering a community-wide effort to discuss, disseminate, and develop more robust methodologies. Targeting to empower especially early-career researchers, this half-day workshop will consolidate efforts from international initiatives, including the IEEE Standards Group P3108 Recommended Practice for Design of Human Subjects Studies in Human-Robot Interaction and this topic group. Our program includes a presentation and discussion on these initiatives, a keynote address focusing on rigorous study reporting, providing an intercontinental perspective, and dedicated mentoring and ideas exchange sessions. A collaborative working session will document the workshop's efforts with attendees starting to draft a community-driven white paper, surveying the current landscape and outlining next steps for experimental design and reporting recommendations in the field of HRI.
Patrick Holthaus, Daniel Hernández García, Patricia Shaw, Francesco Del Duchetto, Marta Romeo, Muneeb Imtiaz Ahmad, Daniel Tozadore, Shelly Bagchi
The BPM-HRI workshop aims to consolidate efforts in disseminating and further developing recommended practices and methods in the field of HRI, with a focus on supporting early-career researchers to adopt such practices and develop their professional network in the community.
Our half-day workshop will consist of two parts. At first, we present the efforts of IEEE P3108 and the UK-HRI topic group, two international initiatives facilitating recommended practices in the HRI community, disseminating them, and enabling early career researchers to get access to supporting resources and guidance. The workshop will further feature a keynote by Katie Seaborn (Institute of Science Tokyo), who drives forward standardising efforts around study reporting in HCI and HRI, providing insights on rigorous methods with a focus on the Japanese research culture.
The first part will be followed by a series of interactive sessions. We will hold a mentoring and ideas exchange fed by questions sent by participants via an expression of interest form on our website before the workshop, complemented by a working session to identify potential mentoring arrangements, expanding on the remits of the topic group activities, to translate the discussions during the workshop into workable mentoring relationships. Moreover, we invite interested participants to start drafting and contributing to a white paper that strategically addresses individual aspects of human-subject studies and informs the research community about these recommendations. The white paper will continue to be developed following the workshop, drawing on expertise from around the world to support the development of best practices in the future.
The workshop is in full alignment with the conference theme empowering society by giving early career researchers the necessary knowledge and network to thrive in the field. Through this, we hope to strengthen the field of HRI, leading to more robust and reliable systems in the future.
Assuming a time allocation between 9:00 am and 1:00 pm, including a coffee break, our schedule is as follows:
9:00 Welcome & introduction
9:15 P3108 and UK-HRI activities
10:15 Keynote speaker presentation
10:45 Coffee break
11:00 Mentoring and ideas exchange
11:30 Best practices and methods
12:15 White paper development
13:00 Wrapping up
Please use this form to submit your EOI (expression of interest) for the workshop. Just so you know, this will be an in-person event with limited (or potentially no) capacity for online participation. Note that registration is completely optional; it helps us gauge the interest in the workshop and its different activities.