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.
Here are the upcoming Blue Sky Idea Conference Tracks:
- RSS (Robotics Science and Systems) is holding a special half day workshop on the 50th Anniversary of Shakey: The Role of AI to Harmonize Robots and Humans on the morning of July 16th, 2015 in Rome, Italy.
- The three winners of the Blue Sky Ideas Track will be announced that morning.
- BDM2I (Biomedical Data Mining, Modeling, and Semantic Integration), on October 11-12th, 2015 in Bethlehem, PA.
- The CCC is sponsoring a Challenges and Visions Track for this workshop. Top 3 papers accepted to this special track will receive awards as travel grant. The submission deadline has been extended until July 15, 2015.
- 3rd ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems is holding a conference on November 3-6, 2015 in Seattle, Washington.
- The paper submission has already closed, but the winners will be announced this fall.
- The thirtieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence February 12–17, 2016 in Phoenix, Arizona.
- The CCC is sponsoring a Blue Sky Ideas Track which is aimed at presenting ideas and visions that can stimulate the research community to pursue new directions. The electronic submissions of talks and papers are due September 15, 2015.
To learn more about Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track, check out the website.