Former CCC Chair, Gregory Hager, introduces Blue Sky Ideas at the conference

Contributions to the following blog were made by former CCC Chair Gregory Hager.

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently sponsored a Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track at the International Symposium on Robotics Research (ISRR) in Puerto Varas, Chile on December 11-14, 2017. The purpose was to encourage papers submissions that describe visionary ideas, long term challenges, and opportunities in research that are outside of the current mainstream topics of the field and which will provoke discussion or debate.

The 15 submissions reflected the breadth of areas and interests in robotics. Organized into three sessions, the papers ranged from the basics of materials and control for new robot designs, to ideas for new ways to make use of perception and learning for robots or teams of robots, to papers that explored ideas advancing diverse elements of a “theory of mind” for robotics. Each of the authors were given five minutes to pitch their idea, followed by 30 minutes of panel discussion and debate with the audience. The final winners represent a broad spectrum of innovative ideas:

Gregory Hager, Nikolaus Correll, and Christoffer Heckman

First Place: Materials that Make Robots Smart
Nikolaus Correll, University of Colorado Boulder
Christoffer Heckman, University of Colorado Boulder

Second Place: Pragmatic-Pedagogic Value Alignment
Jaime F Fisac, University of California Berkeley
Monica Gates, University of California Berkeley
Jessica Hamrick, University of California Berkeley
Chang Liu, University of California Berkeley
Dylan Hadfield-Menell, University of California Berkeley
Malayandi Palaniappan, University of California Berkeley
Dhruv Malik, University of California Berkeley
Shankar Sastry, University of California Berkeley
Tom Griffiths, University of California Berkeley
Anca Dragan, University of California Berkeley

Third Place: DART: Diversity-enhanced Autonomy in Robot Teams
Nora Ayanian, University of Southern California

Third Place: Autonomous Agents in the Wild: Human Interaction Challenges
Laura Major, Draper Labs
Caroline E Harriott, Draper Labs

CCC provides travel awards to authors of the winning papers. We encourage you to apply for a Blue Sky Ideas 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 Blue Sky Ideas track — visit our website.