Are you helping organize a conference in the near future? Consider having a Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track! 

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsors an initiative to bring special “Blue Sky Ideas” tracks to leading computer science research conferences. The goal of this initiative is to help conferences reach out beyond the usual research papers that present completed work and to seek out papers that present ideas and visions that can stimulate the research community to pursue new directions.

Conferences may request CCC sponsorship of such tracks along with a CCC grant that provides prize money for the top 3 papers (first prize $1000, second prize $750, and third prize $500), to be awarded as travel grants.

Papers in a Blue Sky Ideas Track should be open-ended, possibly “outrageous” or “wacky”, and present new problems, new application domains, or new methodologies that are likely to stimulate significant new research.

Check out all the past tracks on the CCC Blue Sky Ideas website. The CCC will be hosting a Blue Sky Ideas Track at the 24th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems. ACM SIGSPATIAL is holding a conference on October 31-November 3, 2016 in San Francisco, CA. The paper submission has already closed, but the winners will be announced on August 31st.

Winners of the Blue Sky Ideas Conference Tracks are invited to submit a Great Innovative Idea to the CCC after the conference to share their paper and work with the broader community.

To learn more about Blue Sky Ideas Conference Tracks and hold one at your conference, please check out this website.