Dear Colleagues, It is our pleasure to invite you to the Special Session on *Empowering Society through Personalised Multimodal HRI* which it will be held at the 28th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI), in the beautiful Naples (Italy) on 5-9 October 2026. You can find the full CFP below, but you can also find more information on https://icmi.acm.org/2026/special-sessions/ and please do not hesitate to contact us. Best regards Alessandra Rossi -- Alessandra Rossi, PhD Assistant Professor Fellow of the Higher Education Academy Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technologies - D.I.E.T.I. University of Naples Federico II Via Claudio, 21, 80125 - Naples, Italy w-page: https://alessandrarossi.net e-mail address: alessandra.rossi@unina.it e-mail address: a.rossi@herts.ac.uk X: @alhandra81 SPECIAL SESSION on Empowering Society through Personalised Multimodal HRI 28th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction 5-9 October 2026, Naples, Italy ICMI website https://icmi.acm.org/2026/ Submission Guidelines https://icmi.acm.org/2026/guidelines/ Submission deadline April 20th, 2026 Paper notification July 1st, 2026 The vision of personal robots capable of supporting, cooperating with, and living among humans holds immense potential for societal good. To realise this vision, robots must move beyond one-size-fits-all interactions and autonomously tailor their behaviour to the unique characteristics of individuals, including their culture, preferences, and cognitive and physical abilities. Personalisation can significantly enhance human-robot interactions in various real-world scenarios by increasing engagement through tailored content, building trust and rapport, improving adherence to the interaction, and enhancing task performance, thus configuring such a technology as a viable tool for promoting equity and access in domains like healthcare, education, and assisted living. As multimodal systems, robots integrate multiple channels of communication and perception to interact with humans and their environment effectively. For instance, a robot equipped with speech recognition capabilities can understand verbal commands and engage in spoken dialogue with users. At the same time, its vision system allows it to perceive facial expressions, gestures, and other visual cues, providing additional context for interpreting the user’s intent and emotional state. Moreover, tactile sensors enable the robot to sense touch and physical interactions, enhancing its ability to respond appropriately to human gestures and contact. By integrating these modalities, the robot can tailor its behaviour dynamically based on the information it gathers from each channel. This special session aims at exploring how robots can interact meaningfully across diverse contexts by going beyond speech and vision processing. It will collect works that explore the need for robots to be culturally and context-aware—capable of understanding not only what people said, but how it is expressed, considering differences and similarities in the richness and expressiveness of communication styles, and what those expressions mean within specific cultural frameworks. This session also focuses on personalisable intelligent agents that are able to adapt not only to individuals, but to the communities and traditions that shape them. Finally, with this special session, we want to promote a design of empowering robotic technologies, developed with and for the people they support, in order to foster inclusivity, embrace diversity, and generate long-term social benefits. To this extent, this special session welcomes research works from a multidisciplinary group of researchers, including, but not limited to, psychology, neuroscience, computer science, robotics, and sociology, to share and discuss current approaches to empowering social assistive robots with adaptive and learning capabilities in order to foster research and development of robotic solutions specifically designed for meeting the individual’s unique needs. Topics include, but are not limited to: - Personalisation in short and long-term HRI - User modelling in HRI - Personalisation for inclusion - Robot’s personality - Socially-aware personalization - Context and situation awareness for robots - Engagement evaluation and re-engagement strategies - Personalised dialogue with robots - Personalised non-verbal behaviour with robots - Adaptive human-aware task planning - Theory of Mind for adaptive interaction - Machine Learning for robotic personalization - Lifelong (continual) learning for adaptation - Adaptation in multimodal interaction - Affective and emotion-adapted HRI - Persuasion in HRI - Personalisation for Sustainability - Culture-aware robots - Evaluation metrics for adaptive robotic behaviour - Ethical implications of personalization - Robot customisation and teaching Contact All questions about submissions should be emailed one of the organisers: Antonio Andriella, Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial, Spain, aandriella@iri.upc.edu Wing-Yue Geoffrey Louie, Oakland University, USA, louie@oakland.edu Alessandra Rossi, University of Naples Federico II, Italy, alessandra.rossi@unina.it Silvia Rossi, University of Naples Federico II, Italy, silvia.rossi@unina.it