CCC Blog

Catalyzing the computing research community and enabling the pursuit of innovative, high-impact research.

Computing Community Consortium Blog

The goal of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is to catalyze the computing research community to debate longer range, more audacious research challenges; to build consensus around research visions; to evolve the most promising visions toward clearly defined initiatives; and to work with the funding organizations to move challenges and visions toward funding initiatives. The purpose of this blog is to provide a more immediate, online mechanism for dissemination of visioning concepts and community discussion/debate about them.

Challenges and Vision Track at Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2013 Conference

July 16th, 2013 / in CCC, research horizons / by Kenneth Hines

The following entry is a special contribution to this blog from Hamidreza Chitsaz, Assistant Professor at Wayne State University. This year Hamidreza and Moslem Kazemi, Carnegie Mellon University organized a challenges and vision track at Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS 2013) on June 27th in Berlin, Germany.

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored three challenges and vision best paper awards at Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2013, a premiere conference on robotics. The conference was held in Berlin, Germany June 24-28, at the Technische Universität Berlin. The best challenges and vision paper awards promote visioning and revolutionary novel ideas in robotics, on principles and applications that address the most difficult challenges as well as new directions for the next generation of corobots. This year’s winning papers were:

1. Soft Subdivision Search in Motion Planning, authored by Chee K. Yap (Courant Institute, NYU)

2. Large Motion Libraries: Toward a “Google” for Robot Motions. authored by Kris Hauser (Indiana University)

3. Predicting the Change – A Step Towards Life-Long Operation in Everyday Environments, authored by Niko Sünderhauf, Peer Neubert and Peter Protzel (Technische Universität Chemnitz)

CCC will provide travel awards to authors of the awarded papers. This is the first year that the CCC has sponsored the challenges and vision award at the RSS conference. With the advent of corobots acting in direct support of individuals and groups, we are now at the dawn of a new era in which semiautonomous robots intimately enter our lives. In such a symbiotic human-robot and bionic world, corobotic systems with critical missions will emerge as human mates for medical, educational, entertainment, and military applications.

The award enables the RSS Community to recognize the critical new problems that do not fit into the conventional frameworks as well as novel directions expected to help solve existing unresolved problems, particularly in light of the paradigm shift induced by this change. (http://compbio.cs.wayne.edu/robotics/rcv2013).

We encourage you to apply for a Challenges and Visions track at your conference! Requests need only include a brief description of the conference and a proposed list of program committee members for the track.

For more information — including guidelines for conference program committees, recommendations for selecting winners, and logistics for issuing CCC-sponsored travel awards to the winners, as well as a sample call for papers for a Challenges and Visions track — visit http://cra.org/ccc/vct.php.