IJCAI-09 AI Video Competition

Pasadena Convention Center Renovation & Expansion Project

http://www.aivideo.org
Call for Videos

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

1. Can anyone attend the Awards Ceremony at IJCAI-09, even if they haven't registered to attend the conference?
   Yes! It's open to the public. Bring your family members and friends. Members of the media are also welcome.

2. How should AAAI's Video Distribution Form, which is requested of accepted videos, be completed and returned to AAAI?
   Good question! A few of these fields are confusing:
   • Editor's Name(s): I'd leave this blank
   • Title (if not Author): I'd leave this blank
   • FAX Number: 650-321-4457 (Find this at the parent node in this form's pathname.)

3. How many submissions have you received so far for this year's competition?
   Here's the list of submissions received; our goal is 40.
   1. Galactic Arms Race (GAR): Automatic Content Generation In a Multiplayer Online Video Game, Erin J. Hastings, Ratan K. Guha, and Kenneth O. Stanley (U. Central Florida) 23 April 2009
   2. EDGE (Enhanced Device for Geospatial Exploration): Feras Batarseh (U. Central Florida) 4 May 2009
   3. Learning Kinematic Models of Articulated Objects, Juergen Sturm, Vijay Pradeep, Cyril Stachniss, Christian Plagemann, Kurt Konolige, and Wolfram Burgard (University of Freiburg and Willow Garage) 8 May 2009
   4. The Autonomous City Explorer Project, Andrea Bauer, Klaas Klasing, Tingting Xu, Stefan Sosnowski, Georgios Lidoris, Quirin Mühlbauer, Tianguang Zhang, Florian Rohrmüller, Dirk Wollherr, Kolja Kühnlenz, and Martin Buss (Technische Universität München) 8 May 2009
   5. Applying Case-Based Reasoning to Texas Hold'em Poker, Jonathan Rubin and Ian Watson (University of Auckland) 11 May 2009
   6. The Pointing Game, Aaron Holroyd, Brett Ponsler, Punsak Koakiettaveechai, Brad Miller, and Charles Rich (Worcester Polytechnic Institute) 14 May 2009
   7. Motion synthesis and control learning for (un)Knotting deformable linear objects, Sandhya Prabhakaran (University of Edinburgh and University of Basel) 14 May 2009
   8. Tools for Learning Artificial Intelligence, Byron Knoll, Alan Mackworth, David Poole, Giuseppe Carenini, and Jacek Kisynki (University of British Columbia) 15 May 2009
   9. The Dinochrome Brigade, William M. Spears and Paul M. Maxim (University of Wyoming) 15 May 2009
   10. Multi-camera People Tracking Presented by a Humanoid, Kyungnam (Ken) Kim (HRL Laboratories, USA) 16 May 2009
   11. Copycat Hand for All, Motomasa Tomida, Takanobu Tanimoto, and Kiyoshi Hoshino (University of Tsukuba) 16 May 2009
   12. Joystick Everywhere, Motomasa Tomida, Daisuke Mori, and Kiyoshi Hoshino (University of Tsukuba) 16 May 2009
   13. Toward Interactive Learning of Container and Non-Container Objects, Shane Griffith, Jivko Sinapov, Matthew Miller, and Alexander Stoytchev (Iowa State University) 16 May 2009
   14. A Plan-Based Machinima Creation System, Mike Dominguez (North Carolina State University) 17 May 2009
   15. How to Cook as Perfect Love Story (with Case-Based Reasoning)?, Amélie Cordier (LIRIS, Lyon 1 University) 17 May 2009
   16. CogSketch: Open-Domain Sketch Understanding for Research and Education, Kate Lockwood, Andrew Lovett, Jeffrey Usher, Penny Yin, Jon Wetzel, and Kenneth Forbus (Northwestern University) 17 May 2009
   17. Bodies In Motion: Dynamic Motion Capture, Daniel Byers, Marek Vondrak, Leonid Sigal, and Odest Chadwicke Jenkins (Brown University and University of Toronto) 17 May 2009
   18. Situated Interaction, Dan Bohus and Eric Horvitz (Microsoft Research) 17 May 2009
   19. Recommendation Agent for Virtual Worlds, Fahad Shah, Philip Bell, and Gita Sukthankar (University of Central Florida) 17 May 2009
   20. SDyna learning to play Counter-Strike, Thomas Degris (University of Alberta) 17 May 2009
   21. Reinforcement learning by example, Cosmin Paduraru, Robert West and Imad Khoury (McGill University) 17 May 2009
   22. Real Live Robot Learning, Michael Littman and Kaushik Subramanian (Rutgers University) 17 May 2009
   23. Using Entropy to Distinguish Shape versus Text in Hand-Drawn Diagrams, Akshay Bhat and Tracy Hammond (Texas A&M University, College Station) 17 May 2009
   24. News at Seven: The Future of the Future, Lisa Gandy, Nathan D. Nichols, and Kristian J. Hammond (Northwestern University) 17 May 2009
   25. Penso BCI System, Dorian Peters, Rafael A. Calvo, and Payam Aghaeipour (University of Sydney) 23 May 2009
   26. Write. Reflect. Polish., Dorian Peters, and Rafael A. Calvo (University of Sydney) 23 May 2009
   27. Robots to the Rescue: Mixed-initiative human-robot teaming for disaster response, Cynthia Breazeal, Matt Berlin, Paula Aguilera, Kenton Williams, Julie A. Adams, Philipp Robbel, Sanford Freedman, Jonathan How, Aditya Undurti, Jesse Gray, Stefanie Tellex, Nicholas Roy, Tom Kollar, Sigurdur Orn Adalgeirsson, Jason Alonso, Fardad Faridi, Jun Ki Lee, Mikey Siegel, Sophie Wang, and Jonathan Williams (MIT and Vanderbilt University) 27 May 2009
   28. Improving Offensive Performance through Opponent Modeling, Kennard R. Laviers and Gita Sukthankar (University of Central Florida) 29 May 2009
   29. WiiGesture, Michael Delp (University of Alberta) 30 May 2009
   30. Real-Life Reinforcement Learning, Ali Nouri and Michael L. Littman (Rutgers University) 31 May 2009
   31. Playbook: a new approach to tasking interfaces, David Musliner and Bryan Bell (Smart Information Flow Technologies) 31 May 2009
   32. Robot Right Round, Jennifer Kay and Stephen Smith (Rowan University) 31 May 2009
   33. Conversational Virtual Role Players, Joel Harris and Prasan Samtani (Alelo, Inc.) 31 May 2009
   34. The Stanford Autonomous Helicopter, Adam Coates, Pieter Abbeel, and Andrew Y. Ng (Stanford University) 31 May 2009
   35. The Intelligent 'Dynamic' Workbook for Learning Written East Asian Languages, Paul Taele and Tracy Hammond (Texas A&M University) 1 June 2009
   36. Little Robot Goes Missing, Eszter Szepesvari, (Vernon Barford Junior High School, Edmonton) Reka Szepesvari (Harry Ainlay High School, Edmonton), and Csaba Szepesvari (University of Alberta) 1 June 2009
   37. Robotic Secrets Revealed, Episode 001, Anthony M. Harrison, Benjamin R. Fransen, Magdalena Bugajska, and J. Gregory Trafton (Naval Research Laboratory) 1 June 2009
   38. Flexible Spine Humanoid Robots, Jimmy Or (Waseda U.) 4 June 2009
   39. Casey's Quest: Transfer Learning for Adversarial Environments, Philip Moore, Matthew Molineaux, and Kalyan Gupta (Knexus Research Corporation) 4 June 2009

4. Can a video be submitted if it's old and/or already placed on some web site (e.g., youtube.com)?
   Yes! Old videos, or those previously publicized, are fine (but see our general expectations answer below, as you may want to slightly or significantly revise the video for this competition). In this way, the competition could serve to further disseminate such videos, which fits into our goals of encouraging the creation and dissemination of videos on AI research and practice. However, we discourage the resubmission of a video that was published as an accepted video in our two previous AI Video Competitions (i.e., at AAAI-07 or AAAI-08).

5. Can PC members submit a video?
   Yes! We'll de-conflict the reviewing process.

6. What are the general expectations of a video submission?
   In addition to addressing the Reviewing Criteria, it should be self-contained. For example, we anticipate the submissions will
   1. display initial information (e.g., title, developer names and affiliations, developer contact information (usually, just an email address)),
   2. integrate audio with video (e.g., for narration),
   3. (somewhere, perhaps early on) indicate the general context of the video,
   4. include some brief but easily digested visual technical summary (e.g., a slide in the middle of the presentation, to help explain the approach), and
   5. display credits at the end of the video (perhaps reiterating some of the initial information).
   Not all of these are necessarily needed/required, but these are typical of what we've received in previous videos (2007, 2008).

7. What if faculty members encouraged their students to submit videos as part of a class project?
   That would be lovely/welcome, and we have a first example. Prof. Gita Sukthankar (UC Florida) has encouraged her students, as an extra credit task, to create and submit AI videos on their class projects. Here are the details.

8. Do we need to provide a downloadable URL or does it suffice to post this at our favorite viewable video site?
   We request a downloadable URL for the following (and other) reasons:
   1. We'd like to keep a mirror copy for reviewers to access
   2. We also will make all of the submissions available via a single location, in a form that doesn't require downloading, to make it easy for the reviewers to look at them.
   3. It helps us to keep track of what has been submitted.

9. Is it important that the videos be entertaining?
   They should not be dull. Prospective viewers (e.g., a prospective student, a colleague, a potential sponsor) will have greater interest in seeing your video if the title is accurate/intriguing, the beginning explains the focus, and visualization cues are used to help the viewer understand the problem(s) being addressed, method being used to address them, and the progress/status of the effort. This doesn't preclude a highly-theoretical focus! We had several videos in previous years that were highly theoretical. However, as with all video submissions, some imagination is needed to make the videos engaging.

   Of most importance is that the AI relevance/contribution should be made clear.

10. Who can submit a video?
    Anyone! We have no constraints on location, seniority, experience with video development, etc. For example, in 2007 we received a terrific submission from a group of undergraduates, several from folks who had never previously created a video, and many from outside of the USA (e.g., including 4 of our 6 award-winners). These trends continued in 2008.

11. Must the winners attend the ceremony?
    No. If they cannot, then we'll ask them to create a short video taping their acceptance speech. This occurred for half the award winners in 2007. (All the winners from 2008 attended or had a proxy.)

12. Can you provide travel funding for students?
    Not as of now (12 March 2009). If all goes well, we may be able raise sponsorship funding that could assist some developer(s) of an accepted video...but that's a work in progress. If you're a student, consider checking into whether you can serve as a volunteer at IJCAI in exchange for some discount on the registration cost.

13. If a submission is accepted, must the developers sign a AAAI copyright form?
    Good news: No! In cases where this is not feasible, the developers need only sign a AAAI Video Distribution License.

14. Will there be time for developers to update an accepted video?
    Yes. We plan to inform developers by 1 June as to whether their submitted videos are accepted. They'll have until 3 July to update them in response to the reviewers' suggestions.

15. What lessons did you learn last year?
    
    • Schedule the submission deadline for early June. Scheduling it in April conflicts with other deadlines.
    • Use ConfMaster someday, assuming we can adapt to it.
    • Collect short descriptions of each video when they are submitted.
    • Warn the developers ahead of time that, if their video is nominated for an award it still may not be officially nominated. We must have a culling process due to the (fortunately) high number of nominations we received (57 in 2008). Perhaps it's best to move the nominations to the "Read by organizers/PC only" section of the review.
    • Warn the developers of accepted videos that we'll request a 30-second "trailer" for any nominated video. We'll screen these trailers at the awards ceremony.
    • The primary response our PC gives to every video is "please make it more clear how AI is used here". We'll probably weight this more heavily from now on.

16. How are you planning to select winners this year?
    We'll try arranging for small (2-3?) person committees, selected from within the PC, to handle each category. We'll look for volunteers among the PC to do this, and provide them with a short list of the nominated videos in their category. The co-chairs will be responsible for selecting those nominees, based on the reviews of the PC (who will be encouraged to nominate videos they think are good).

    Let's see how this works.

17. What's the long-range plan here?
    There's continued interest/fun in holding this competition, so its future looks bright. But it takes substantial effort to organize, and it's important to pass its leadership around to continue the influx of good ideas and avoid stagnation. Therefore, David Aha is (reluctantly) looking for someone to take over his role as co-chair in 2010. Volunteers? Please contact him (david dot aha at nrl dot navy dot mil) if you're interested.

18. What's surprised and/or encouraged you about this event?
    
    • The high quality and imagination of the videos.
    • When being invited onto the PC, several folks say they're happy to be involved. That's cool; compared to a traditional paper-reviewing commitment, it's more fun and requires less time to review a video submission.
    • The breadth of topics addressed in these videos; even the seemingly dullest topic can be vividly brought to an exciting life when you're passionate about creating an interesting video.
    • That we really have to separate its submission deadline from traditional deadlines...or else the latter take precedence, and we don't meet our goal for the number of submissions.
    • The speed with which (e.g., 2 days) motivated researchers can create high-quality videos when they're up against the submission deadline.
    • That many people share with us the interest in providing this alternative, albeit limited, modality for communicating the excitement of AI.
    • The amount of planning required to ensure that the awards ceremony is worth attending.
    • That attendees of the ceremony leave smiling.

19. This looks great! How can my organization help out?
    
    1. We seek your video submissions!
    2. We seek awards sponsors!
    3. We welcome technical sponsors!
    4. Publicity! We would be grateful for any help you can provide to get the word out.
    5. We welcome volunteers at the ceremony! For example, to help direct people to the ceremony, to advertise it, and to participate in the ceremony itself.

    Please contact David Aha (david.aha at nrl.navy.mil) and/or Mike Bowling (bowling at cs.ualberta.ca) for more information.