Program

The General Idea

The scientific program of the Oxford Summit on Robotics will be concerned with a number of themes to be determined prior to the meeting by the participants. These will form the basis for interactive and interwoven discussion threads. The intention is to let discussions evolve, including a change in emphasis or initiation of other threads in response to the discussions at the meeting.

Each day will consist of three types of sessions: workshop sessions, speaker’s corner and open debate. The workshop sessions will be themed and proceedings will be led by a team of individuals. Speaker’s corner provides a space for short visionary, provocative or risky statements regarding ideas, topics, views or approaches that would normally not be presented at a conference or workshop. Open debate sessions are scheduled with increasing frequency to provide space for previous discussions to overrun and evolve.

Themes

The following themes have been identified as being of interest for this Summit and will provide a context for the workshop sessions (names in brackets indicate theme leads):

  • [WS1] Progress vs Progress in Robotics. (Brock, Mason)
  • [WS2] Connecting robotics and sensorimotor biology: a back alley or super highway? (Pai, Vijayakumar)
  • [WS3] Beyond ML: challenges and opportunities for Robot Learning. (Posner, Toussaint)
  • [WS4] How much uncertainty do we really need to represent or reason about? (Fox, Kress-Gazit)
  • [WS5] Manipulation is more than just grasping. (Srinivasa, Lozano-Perez)
  • [WS6] Lessons to be learned from biologically inspired perception. (Smithson, Stoytchev)

Putative Schedule

While day-to-day proceedings are not cast in stone a putative schedule looks like this:

WEDTHURFRI
08.45 –
09.00		Opening
09.00 –
10.30		Workshop
(WS1)		Workshop
(WS4)		Workshop
(WS6)
10.30 –
11.15		Speaker’s
Corner		Speaker’s
Corner		Speaker’s
Corner
11.15 –
12.45		Workshop
(WS2)		Open DebateOpen Debate
12.45 –
14.00		LunchLunchLunch
14.00 –
15.30		Workshop
(WS3)		Workshop
(WS5)		Digest/Closing
15.30 –
16.15		Speaker’s
Corner		Speaker’s
Corner
16.15 –
17.45		Open DebateOpen Debate
18.00 –
22.00		Plenary Talk 
& Dinner