HRI Supplementary Materials

HRI is unusual among conferences in how much the video matters. The interaction it studies is temporal and embodied, and prose cannot convey what a robot's timing, motion, and presence do to a person. A well-made supplementary video figure materially changes how reviewers understand the contribution — and its absence is often read as a gap. This skill plans the video and the rest of the supplement, and splits content between the body and the supplement by decision-criticality.

The video figure comes first

Treat the video as a first-class artifact, not an afterthought:

• Show the interaction, not just the robot: the person and robot together, the conditions being compared, and the behavior your contribution designs or studies. A reviewer should see the difference your paper claims.
• Keep it short and legible — a focused clip (often a couple of minutes; check the current call for length/size limits, 待核实 per cycle) beats a long unedited recording. Caption or narrate what to look at.
• Anonymize it for review — this is the most-missed double-blind leak. Blur or omit identifiable faces, mute or remove identifying voices and lab/institution logos, and strip filename/metadata that names an author. If participants did not consent to public video, use a review-only, de-identified cut (see hri-reproducibility).
• Format for reviewers — a widely playable codec/container and a size the submission portal accepts; a video a reviewer cannot open is a video that does not exist.

The decision-criticality rule

Ask of every piece of content: could a reviewer reach the accept/reject decision without seeing this?

• No → it belongs in the 8-page body. The core design, the study design, the primary results and their effect sizes, the main figures, and the central limitation must be in the paper. Reviewers are not required to read the supplement to judge the paper, and decision-critical material hidden in an appendix is effectively invisible.
• Yes → it can go to the supplement. Full instrument text, extended tables, additional analyses, qualitative excerpts, and implementation detail live outside the body.

The 8-page budget (incl. figures, excl. references) forces this discipline; use it to keep the body sharp, not to smuggle the argument into an appendix.

What the supplement typically holds

• Video figure (the centerpiece) and, if relevant, a short demo clip.
• Study instruments — full questionnaires with items and scoring, interview guides, task instructions, consent-form summary.
• Coding schemes and qualitative appendices — codebooks, extended excerpts, additional themes.
• Extended results — full statistical tables, robustness/secondary analyses, per-condition breakdowns that would crowd the body.
• Robot-behavior details — parameters, WoZ protocol specifics, additional apparatus figures.
• Reproducibility artifact pointer — the (anonymized) archive of de-identified data and analysis code (see hri-reproducibility).

Keep the body self-sufficient

• Every claim that decides the paper must be supported in the body; the supplement enriches, it does not carry.
• Reference supplementary items explicitly ("full scale in the supplement," "see supplementary video"), so reviewers know they exist — but never make a core inference depend on following the link.
• Do not use the supplement to exceed the page limit by relocating essential text; reviewers and chairs notice.

Anonymization sweep for the supplement

Double-blind covers everything uploaded, not just the PDF:

• Video — faces, voices, logos, on-screen names, file metadata.
• Data files — free-text fields, participant identifiers, embedded author metadata.
• Code/materials — author names in headers, institution paths, repository owners.
• Archive — host behind an anonymizing view; a personal domain both rots and reveals identity.

See hri-submission for the mechanical checklist to run on the final files.

Anti-patterns HRI reviewers flag

• No video for a paper about embodied, temporal interaction.
• A video that leaks identity (faces/voices/logos) in double-blind review.
• Decision-critical results only in the supplement, leaving the body unable to stand alone.
• An unplayable or oversized video the portal or reviewer cannot open.
• Appendix used to dodge the page limit by relocating essential argument.

Output format

[Video] present? shows the interaction/conditions? length/format within limits?
[Video anonymization] faces/voices/logos/metadata clean for double-blind?
[Body sufficiency] all decision-critical content in the 8 pages? yes/no
[Supplement contents] instruments · coding schemes · extended results · artifact pointer
[Anonymization] video + data + code + archive all swept?
[Fix queue] <ordered>