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 Yao-Yi Chiang from the University of Southern California. His Querying Historical Maps as a Unified, Structured, and Linked Spatiotemporal Source paper was the first place winner at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Track Competition at the ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems 2015 (SIGSPATIAL 2015) in Seattle, Washington. The Innovative Idea Historical maps hold a great deal of detailed geographic information at various times in the past but finding relevant maps is difficult and the map content are not machine-readable. Using computer algorithms and geospatial technology applications, I am building the techniques to unlock historical information from maps. I envision a […]

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 Dr. Xiaojin (Jerry) Zhu, Associate Professor of Computer Science at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Zhu’s paper Machine Teaching: an Inverse Problem to Machine Learning and an Approach Toward Optimal Education won the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track series at the 29th Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-15), January 25-30, 2015 in Austin, Texas. The Innovative Idea Machine teaching is machine learning turned upside down: it is about finding the optimal (e.g. the smallest) training set.  For example, consider a “student” who runs the Support Vector Machine learning algorithm.  Imagine a teacher who wants to teach the student a specific target hyperplane in some […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is delighted to announce a new feature on our website! Great Innovative Ideas are a way to showcase the exciting new research and ideas generated by the computing community. Once a month we will post an article highlighting new research going on in the field and ideas generated by our colleagues. This feature will replace the Highlight of the Week. All previously posted highlights of the week are archived here. A few of the ideas showcased in Great Innovative Ideas will be from the CCC Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track, including our first Great Innovative Idea from Marian Petre (Open University) and Daniela Damian (University of […]