We Robot 2025 - Call for Papers, Posters & Demos
* Please note Easy Chair will be running site maintenance on Wednesday Oct 30 and may be inaccessible temporarily. Paper Proposal deadline extended to Monday November 4! *
We Robot is heading to Canada! Join us for the first in-person We Robot conference north of the Canada-US border.
We eagerly invite submissions for the 13th annual We Robot Conference to be held at the University of Windsor on April 4 and 5, 2025. A pre-conference workshop will also be held on April 3, 2025. The city and the University of Windsor sit on the traditional territory of the Three Fires Confederacy of First Nations, which includes the Ojibwa, the Odawa, and the Potawatomi. Waawiiatanong (“Where the River Bends” in Anishinaabemowin) has served as a meeting place for centuries.
We Robot is the premiere international conference on law and policy relating to robotics. We Robot 2025 seeks contributions from academics, practitioners, artists, and polymaths, in the form of scholarly papers, technological demonstrations, or posters. We invite submissions on a range of topics related to the legal, policy, ethical, economic, social, and/or cultural aspects of robotics and artificial intelligence. Our thoroughly interdisciplinary program committee particularly encourages papers with co-authors from different fields.
Paper authors will be invited to contribute their papers to a special conference issue of the peer-reviewed Canadian Journal of Law and Technology.
The University of Windsor is situated at the busiest international commercial crossing between Canada and the United States. Windsor Law is home to a thriving community of critical legal scholarship, and centers of research in law & tech, entertainment, cities, Indigenous legal orders, disability & social change, and transnational law & racial justice. We warmly welcome submissions engaging diverse methodologies, and exploring wide-ranging questions of robotics law & policy, including but not limited to transnational and border issues, international commerce and commercial protection, etc.
Hosted over the years by the law schools of Miami, Washington, Boston, Yale, Stanford, and UOttawa, We Robot fosters conversations between the people designing, building, and deploying robots and the people who shape or experience the legal and social structures in which robots will operate.
If you have any questions about the submission process or want to request an extension for your submission, please email WeRobot@uwindsor.ca with the subject “Submission Question” or “Extension.” If you have technical questions or difficulties with the Easy Chair submission please email bolt@uw.edu.
Currently we are planning for an in-person event, and are exploring ways to allow for some remote participation.
Timelines
Call for papers, posters, and technology demonstrations opens October 1, 2024. Paper abstracts and poster/demo proposals must be submitted through EasyChair (see below).
Call for papers closes Monday November 4, 2024 (Midnight PDT). The Program Committee will return our decisions as quickly as possible.
Call for Posters and Technology Demos closes January 31, 2025, but acceptances may be offered on a rolling basis (i.e. it may be beneficial to submit earlier)
Final papers will be due on March 7, 2025. Extensions may be granted with prior approval. Failure to submit on time may result in withdrawal of the submission.
Scholarly Papers
See here for some tips on what makes a great We Robot proposal.
We also encourage you to peruse our twelve years of previous conferences for examples of successful papers.
How to Propose a Paper. Papers should be submitted through the conference submission portal. Proposers will need to provide:
Title of the proposed paper and an abstract of between 500 and 1000 words. Submitters are cautioned that proposals that exceed the length limit will be rejected unread. In addition (not counted in the word limit) please provide a list of up to 5 key references that you refer to in the paper that will help us understand how to situate your paper in the relevant literature;
Please do NOT put any names or biographical information in your uploaded proposal. However, on a separate sheet, please – again without your name(s) or the name(s) of institutions or corporations – list the current title of each contributor (e.g. “Ph. D candidate in Mechanical Engineering” or “Associate Professor of Anthropology” or “Chief Technologist at Robotics Startup”). We are asking for this information because in past years we have sometimes struggled to determine whether proposers had the experience or disciplinary breadth to deliver on certain types of ambitious proposals; purely anonymous submissions did not, for example, allow us to tell if submissions were by one person or a group.
To preserve anonymous review, please do not ask members of the program or review committee to review draft abstracts in advance of submission.
Note on EasyChair submissions: We ask that you please fill in both the required abstract text box and upload a separate pdf of your abstract for initial submissions, in addition to including a separate page with the title of each contributor (as noted above). If you have any issues with using EasyChair, please email bolt@uw.edu with any questions.
Subject to funding availability, we intend to provide for domestic Canada & U.S. air travel (and at least partial funding for international air travel), plus lodging, for one paper presenter provided the full paper is submitted by the due date.
Demonstrations
We invite proposals for demonstrations of interesting new robots and related technology. Unlike scholarly papers, proposals for demonstrations may be purely descriptive and designer/builders will be asked to present their work themselves. We’d like to hear about your latest innovations, what’s on the drawing board for the next generations of robots, or about legal and policy issues you have encountered in the design or deploy process. We will prioritize demos with a hardware component, so please plan to bring your own robot (BYOR) if you can.
How to pitch a demo: Demos should be submitted through the conference Easy Chair submission portal. Please include a description of what you have, or are doing, with links to any relevant photos or audio-visual information, as well as your C.V. or other relevant background. Please be sure to choose the “Demo” track for your upload. Please include a brief description of what facilities and resources your demonstration might require (e.g., power, internet connection, space).
We waive conference fees for all demonstrators.
Poster Session
We Robot’s poster session is designed to accommodate early-stage, cutting-edge, or late-breaking projects. We are especially eager to hear from students, post-docs and early career researchers. This session is ideal for researchers to get feedback on a work in progress. At least one of the authors of each accepted poster should plan to be present at the poster during the entire poster session, and for a “lightning round” of presentations during the main session. You can bring the poster or, in some cases, with sufficient lead time we may be able to print it for you. If accepted, you will also need to provide a web-friendly summary of the work that we can post on the conference web site.
How to propose a poster session: Poster sessions should be submitted through the conference submission portal. Please include an up to 500 word description of what you have or are doing, with links to any relevant photos or audio visual information, as well as your C.V. Please be sure to choose the “Posters” track for your upload. We’ll be accepting poster proposals on a rolling basis, meaning that there is an advantage to submitting early. Remember, at least one author of an accepted poster must register for the conference to submit the final version.
We waive conference fees for all poster authors.
Important Note
At We Robot, paper authors generally do not present their own papers. Unless otherwise indicated during acceptance, every paper accepted will be assigned a discussant who will present and comment on the paper. These presentations situate and comment upon the paper, kicking off the conversation. Authors will be able to respond briefly (no more than 5 minutes). The rest of the session will consist of a group discussion with the discussant acting as a moderator. We make all papers available up to month before the conference so that the discussant and all attendees can read them. We invite expressions of interest from potential discussants. If you are interested in commenting on a paper, please email werobot@uwindsor.ca with the subject “Discussant.”
