The following Great Innovative Idea is from Mark Bernstein, the chief scientist at Eastgate Systems, Inc. Mark was one of the winners at the recent Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track at the 29TH ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, July 9-12, 2018 in Baltimore, MD. His paper is called “As We May Hear: Our Slaves of Steel II.” The Idea Everyone’s everyday knowledge work is increasingly tied up with personal agents that one gradually trains to help in the work. In the paper, we imagine a restaurant host (or a diplomatic aide) working with a chorus of audio advisors to identify patrons (or diplomats) and to identify their needs and preferences. Though audio hypertext […]

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 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 […]