The following is a guest blog by Greg Hager, Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Chair and Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University.  I recently had the opportunity to participate in a panel discussing the National Robotics Initiative (NRI). The NRI is in its 5th year, so we were asked to describe “the return on investment” of the program. Various panel members pointed out how focused and energized robotics is on high-value, relevant applications, and how it has created new startups, a new cohort of students who will power the next wave of R&D innovation, and, of course, a host of new research results. But what does this really […]

In celebration of the fifth anniversary of the National Robotics Initiative (NRI), the Congressional Robotics Caucus Advisory Committee including IEEE-USA, Computing Research Association, Carnegie Mellon University, and Georgia Tech with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) held a Congressional Briefing with demonstrations and the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) released it’s report called Next Generation Robotics. The NRI was a direct result of a CCC roadmapping effort led by Henrik Christensen of Georgia Tech. It is based on a definitive report, A Roadmap for US Robotics — From Internet to Robotics, developed by more than 100 robotics experts from industry and academia who in 2008 attended four CCC workshops, one in each four topic areas of robotics: manufacturing and logistics, healthcare and medical robotics, service robotics, and emerging technologies. The goal of the NRI is to “accelerate […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC), White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), and Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), are co-sponsoring a public workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Social Good on June 7th, 2016 in Washington, DC. There has been a dramatically increasing interest in Artificial Intelligence (AI) in recent years. AI has been successfully applied to societal challenge problems and it has a great potential to provide tremendous social good in the future. In this workshop, we will discuss the successful deployments and the potential use of AI in various topics that are essential for social good, including but not limited to urban computing, health, environmental sustainability, and public […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) is pleased to announce a distinguished lecture on Wednesday, April 20, 2016 at 2:00pm EDT by Dr. Daniela Rus titled Pervasive Robots. Daniela Rus is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT. She is also a Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member. Rus’s research interests are in robotics, mobile computing, and data science. Rus is a Class of 2002 MacArthur Fellow, a fellow of ACM, AAAI and IEEE, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. She earned her PhD in Computer […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from Nikolaus Correll, Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder, about his paper with University of Colorado at Boulder doctoral student Andy McEvoy on Materials that couple sensing, actuation, computation, and communication.  The Innovative Idea Advances in polymers and miniaturization of computing devices allow us to tightly integrate sensing, actuation, computation and communication into composite materials. Such “robotic materials” can sense their environment at high-bandwidth, implement high-speed feedback control to change their shape or appearance, and solve tough computing problems using distributed algorithms. Examples of such materials include a skin that triangulates and classifies textures rubbed against it, smart glass that can […]

The following Great Innovative Idea is from John Oberlin, Maria Meier, Tim Kraska, and Stefanie Tellex in the Computer Science Department at Brown University. Their Acquiring Object Experiences at Scale was one of the winners at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored 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. The Innovative Idea Baxter is a two armed manipulator robot which which is gaining popularity in the research and industrial communities. At […]