Workshops

Call for Workshop Proposals

Robotics: Science and Systems
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA
August 16th-19th, 2006
http://www.roboticsconference.org

Deadline for Workshop Proposals: March 1st, 2006

Workshop Chairs:
Jim Ostrowski, Evolution Robotics
Mark Yim, University of Pennsylvania

The second "Robotics: Science and Systems" will be held in Philadelphia (PA, USA). The conference will span all areas of robotics bringing together researchers working on algorithmic or mathematical foundations of robotics, robotic applications, and analysis of robotic systems. The main conference will be followed by one day of workshops on August 19, 2006. In addition to the informal forum for research questions, this year the theme is Grand Challenges. Thus, besides traditional workshop proposals, the organizers encourage workshop proposals that plan to develop and discuss grand challenges in different areas of robotics.

Workshop organizers have several responsibilities, including:

	advertising their workshops, inviting the workshop participants, and ensuring a sufficient number of participants;
	coordinating the workshop content, which includes arranging short informal presentations by some of the participants,arranging for expert commentators to sit on the discussion panels, and formulating sets of discussion topics;
	arranging the workshop schedule;
	moderating the discussions; and
	writing brief workshop summaries and coordinating the electronic dissemination of submitted material.

We suggest that workshop organizers allocate at least 40 percent of the workshop schedule to question/answer sessions, poster sessions, informal and panel discussions, demonstrations, and breaks, because workshops otherwise degrade into mini-conferences. For the same reason, we strongly recommend that each full-day workshop include no more than ten talks. We are requesting that workshop organizers allocate at least 30-45 minutes at the end of each workshop to a discussion on the grand challenges faced in the workshop topic area, and to prepare a one page summary of this discussion for possible publication with the RSS proceedings. A sample workshop schedule is available here.

The organizers of each accepted workshop can name up to two people for half-day workshops and four people for full-day workshops who will receive discounted registrations for the workshop program. There is no travel funding available for workshop speakers. Workshop organizers should submit their workshop proposal by March 1, 2006 to rss06workshops@cs.brown.edu. Proposals should include workshop title, a one-page description of the proposed content, and a tentative list of speakers. Workshop organizers will be notified of the decision on their proposals by April 15, 2006.