The following Great Innovative Idea is from Da Yan, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences (CIS) at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). Yan presented his poster, Big Data Frameworks: Bridging High Performance of HPC Community with Programming Friendliness of Data Science Community, at the CCC Symposium on Computing Research, October 23-24, 2017. The Idea Existing Big Data frameworks such as Hadoop, Spark and Google’s Pregel emphasize on programming simplicity, where a distributed algorithm can be written with just a few lines of code. However, they only target data-intensive analytics, where the workloads are mainly generated by data volume, and network communication is the performance bottleneck. For compute-intensive tasks where the […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Osman Dogan Yirmibesoglu, from Oregon State University. His paper called 3D Printing Soft Robots and Design Rules, coauthored by John Morrow and Yigit Menguc, was one of the featured talks at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Material Robotics (MaRo) Workshop at the 2017 Robotics Science and Systems (RSS) Conference. The Idea Capabilities of soft robotic systems are increasing with the development of new manufacturing techniques. And the needs for more soft robots are emerging in the application areas such as biomimicry, cooperative robotics (co-robotics), medical robotics, exploratory robots, etc. To be able to reliably perform in these areas, soft robot control systems and sensors require more attention. In our work, we presented […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Christopher Jonathan, a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. His paper Toward a Unified Spatial Crowdsourcing Platform, co-authored by Mohamed F. Mokbel, was one of the winners of the  Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored a Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track at the 15th International Symposium on Spatial & Temporal Databases (SSTD), August  21-23, 2017 in Arlington, VA. The Idea In recent years, we saw a surge of popularity of applications that provide many kinds of spatial tasks in our life, such as ride-sharing, delivery service, translation task, reviewing restaurants or other point of interests, and many more. While these applications are important to our every day lives, there are lots of […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Po-Jung Huang and Jun Kameoka. Their paper called Pneumatic Actuated Soft Micromold (PASMO) device for Creating 3D Collagen Microparticles was one of the featured talks at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Material Robotics (MaRo) Workshop at the 2017 Robotics Science and Systems (RSS) Conference. The Idea Three-dimensional cell culture is the method that can simply the process for in vivo test. Unlike two-dimensional cell culture, three-dimensional cell culture provides sufficient information, like cell-cell communication and cell-matrix interaction to simulate real human tissue. Pneumatic actuated soft micromold (PASMO) provides a method to generate collagen based three-dimensional microenvironment for simulating progression of tumor and extending to cancer model. PASMO device is integrated […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Jun Zhang and Michael Yip. Their paper called Three-Dimensional Hysteresis Modeling of Robotic Artificial Muscles with Application to Shape Memory Alloy Actuators was one of the featured talks at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Material Robotics (MaRo) Workshop at the 2017 Robotics Science and Systems (RSS) Conference. The Idea Robotic artificial muscles are actuators that can make robots move. Unlike electric motors, robotic artificial muscles are compliant and can generate straight contractions just like our biological muscles. Recently, they are increasingly popular in many exciting areas, such as biomimetic robots, soft robots, and safe human-robot interaction. To practically use robotic artificial muscles, it is crucial to have an accurate model […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Brian Logan (University of Nottingham), John Thangarajah (RMIT University), and Neil Yorke-Smith (American University of Beirut). Their paper called Progressing Intention Progression: A Call for a Goal-Plan Tree Contest was the Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track winner at the Sixteenth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MutliAgent Systems (AAMAS), May 8-12, 2017 in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The Idea A key problem for an agent with multiple, possibly inconsistent, goals is: “what should I do next”? What to do next can be formalized as the intention progression problem (IPP): what means (i.e., plan) to use to achieve a given goal, and which of the currently adopted plans (i.e., intentions) to progress at the current […]