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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.

Blue Sky Ideas- AAAI-RSS Special Workshop on the 50th Anniversary of Shakey

August 3rd, 2015 / in Announcements, Research News / by Helen Wright

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored a Blue Sky Ideas Track Competition at the AAAI-RSS Special Workshop on the 50th Anniversary of Shakey: The Role of AI to Harmonize Robots and Humans in Rome, Italy. It was a half day workshop on July 16th during the Robotics Science and Systems (RSS) 2015 Conference.

This workshop joined a series of events organized by Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and the IEEE Robotics & Automation Society to mark the anniversary of Shakey, the first mobile intelligent robot able to reason about its own actions. One of the invited speakers Peter Hart, who was one of the original Shakey team members, presented at the workshop on Making Shakey.

For the Blue Sky Ideas Track Competition, the workshop organizers invited submissions of abstracts describing new ideas / on-going work at the junction of AI and robotics.

The winning papers were:

Acquiring Object Experiences at Scale
John Oberlin, Maria Meier, Tim Kraska, Stefanie Tellex
(Department of Computer Science, Brown University)

Robobarista: Object Part based Transfer of Manipulation Trajectories from Crowd-sourcing in 3D Pointclouds
Jaeyong Sung, Seok Hyun Jin, Ashutosh Saxena
(Department of Computer Science, Cornell University)

End-to-End Training of Deep Visuomotor Policies
Sergey Levine, Chelsea Finn, Trevor Darrell, Pieter Abbeel
(Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, UC Berkeley)

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.