Keynotes at HRI

Three interesting keynote presentations at HRI:

Akhil Madhani from Walt Disney Imagineering: Akhil Madhani (b. 1968) designed and built the "Silver Falcon" and the "Black Falcon," robots that allow surgeons to perform minimally invasive surgery by remote control, manipulate body tissue, sew and tie off sutures, and conduct other delicate procedures through incisions as small as one inch wide.

Steve Squyres from Cornell: Squyres has participated in a number of planetary spaceflight missions. From 1978 to 1981 he was an associate of the Voyager imaging science team, participating in analysis of imaging data from the encounters with Jupiter and Saturn. He was a radar investigator on the Magellan mission to Venus, a member of the Mars Observer gamma-ray spectrometer flight investigation team, and a co-investigator on the Russian Mars `96 mission

and

Rosalind Picard from MIT Media Labs: Picard is known internationally for envisioning and conducting research in affective computing—computing that relates to, arises from, or deliberately influences emotion or other affective phenomena—and, prior to that, for pioneering research in content-based image and video retrieval.

"Nature" requesting input

PLoS One is working hard to find ways of better peer-reviewing work and understanding the context and limitations of a research effort. Specifically, they are allowing annotations on papers to be added online. At the link below, you can help out by checking through comments and categorizing them.

Start here.

It would be great to see a new effective paradigm for peer-review to emerge, especially for the MAS, MRS community which I think is particularly poorly suited to traditional presentation and review processes.