The following Great Innovative Idea is from Orit Peleg an Assistant Professor of Computer Science from the University of Colorado Boulder. Peleg was one of the participants at the recent Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Robotic Materials workshop. The Idea Animals use a combination of egocentric navigation driven by the internal integration of environmental cues, interspersed with geocentric course correction and reorientation. These processes are accompanied by uncertainty in sensory acquisition of information, planning, and execution. Together with L. Mahadevan (Harvard University) and M. Dacke (Lund University), we consider the question of optimal reorientation rates for the navigation of an agent moving along a preferred direction in the presence of multiple sources of noise. This is inspired […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from John E. Laird from the Unversity of Michigan. Laird was one of the Blue Sky Award winners at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Conference (AAAI-18) for his paper, coauthored with Shiwali Mohan from the Palo Alto Research Center, on Learning Fast and Slow: Levels of Learning in General Autonomous Intelligent Agents. The Idea Our cool idea is that there are two distinct levels at which humans and general AI systems can learn. Level 1 encompasses innate architectural learning mechanisms that are automatic, online, and effortless – capturing knowledge from the agent’s ongoing experience, such as learning skills, experiential knowledge, or facts. Level 2 encompasses deliberate learning strategies that are realized through the […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Tamraparni Dasu, Yaron Kanza, and Divesh Srivastava, from AT&T Labs-Research. They were one of the Blue Sky Award winners at the ACM SIGSPATIAL 2017 conference for their paper, Geotagging IP Packets for Location-Aware Software-Defined Networking in the Presence of Virtual Network Functions. The Idea When routing IP packets on the Internet, the geographic location of routers and switches can be taken into account and utilized, to improve security and support applications such as copyright protection, location-based services, etc. Our main idea is to add to IP packets geotags with spatio-temporal information about the traveled route, e.g., the geographic location of the source. We suggest to use packet encapsulation to add geotags without […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Laura Major, the Vice President of Engineering at CyPhy Works. Major was one of the Blue Sky Award winners at the International Symposium on Robotics Research (ISRR 17) in Puerto Varas, Chile for her paper, Autonomous Agents in the Wild: Human Interaction Challenges.  The Idea Autonomy is moving into commercial applications, where it is being encountered by untrained, unfamiliar consumers. These individuals, with little exposure to autonomy or its principles, will be using advanced automation to perform safety-critical tasks such as driving their cars or flying video-capture drones. While advanced automation has been applied in industrial applications for decades, with experts using it to monitor and control highly […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Jaime Fernandez Fisac, a Ph.D. Candidate in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department at the University of California, Berkeley, in the area of Control, Intelligent Systems and Robotics. Fisac was one of the Blue Sky Award winners at the International Symposium on Robotics Research (ISRR 17) in Puerto Varas, Chile for his paper, Pragmatic-Pedagogic Value Alignment. The Idea Advances in robotics and AI are making robots increasingly capable and autonomous, but how will we ensure they understand what things they should or should not do? Our insight is that a competent robot collaborator should behave like a keen apprentice: humans are naturally skilled at social collaboration, and robots can exploit this fact to tap into […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Kenneth K. Fletcher, an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Fletcher presented his poster, A Method for Dealing with Data Sparsity and Cold-Start Limitations in Service Recommendation Using Personalized Preferences, at the CCC Symposium on Computing Research, October 23-24, 2017. The Idea The idea is to develop and improve on methods and algorithms that incorporate users’ preferences for service selection and recommendation. With the growing number of services (cloud, web, airline, etc) on the Internet having similar functionalities, it is now more challenging to select or recommend the best service(s) that meet(s) users’ needs. Rather than selecting or recommending services based only […]