Call for Workshop Proposals

Robotics: Science and Systems
June 27 - 30, 2007
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, GA, USA
http://www.robotics-conference.org

Submit workshop proposals to rss07workshops@informatik.uni-freiburg.de until January 31, 2007.

Workshop Chair: Udo Frese, University of Bremen

The third "Robotics: Science and Systems" will be held at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta (GA, 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 Saturday, June 30, 2007. This year's motto will be "realistic visions" or in other words bridging the gap between technical sessions and plenary discussions. Thus besides traditional workshop proposals the organizers encourage to discuss goals for robotics that are inventive, challenging, but still achievable. 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

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, 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 January 31, 2007 to rss07workshops@informatik.uni-freiburg.de. 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 March 15, 2007.