This article is published in the March 2018 issue.

Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track at AAAI-18


One of the authors of the first place paper, Ana Paiva, receives her award from the organizers.

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently sponsored a Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track at the 32nd Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-18), February 2-7, 2018 in New Orleans, LA. The purpose of this conference was to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines.

The goal of this track was to present ideas and visions that can stimulate the research community to pursue new directions, such as new problems, new application domains, or new methodologies.

First place: Ana Paiva, Fernando P. Santos, and Francisco C. Santos
Engineering Pro-Sociality with Autonomous Agents

Second Place: John E. Laird and Shiwali Mohan
Learning Fast and Slow: Levels of Learning in General Autonomous Intelligent AgentsThird place: Sridhar Mahadevan
Imagination Machines: A New Challenge for Artificial Intelligence

CCC provides travel awards to authors of the winning papers. We encourage you to apply for a Blue Sky Ideas track at your conference!Requests need only include a brief description of the conference and a proposed list of program committee members for the track. For more information — including guidelines for conference program committees, recommendations for selecting winners, and logistics for issuing CCC-sponsored travel awards to the winners, as well as a sample call for papers for a Blue Sky Ideas track — visit our website.