The Organizing Committee for the 2021 Robotics: Science and Systems Conference (RSS 2021) requests proposals for full and half-day workshops and tutorials to be held Online on July 12-16, 2021. Workshop proposals should be submitted by March 15, 2021 via EasyChair here.
Please contact the workshop chairs for any clarifications.
The RSS workshops and tutorials provide high-quality, topically-focused forums for researchers at the forefront of robotics. This year these events will take place throughout the conference between July 12 and 16. Workshops will be interleaved with the virtual conference and encouraged to run at different times in order to accommodate participants across the globe. We encourage workshop organizers to prioritize discussions and virtual poster sessions to occur during synchronous meetings and leverage pre-recorded content where available to allow participants access to materials prior to the meeting.
Workshops and tutorials are intended to supplement the primary conference; as such we seek workshops that will provide a complement to the research in the proceedings being presented in the primary single-track event and tutorials that could support researchers new to the field in quickly gaining the necessary skills and knowledge.
While not always a focus at RSS, this year we specifically seek submissions for tutorials. Our hope is that the online format of RSS will enable many to attend and learn from these tutorials. It is our intention to work with the organizers of tutorials to provide a long-term, online home for their materials and presentations for future use by other students and researchers.
Furthermore, we are looking for workshops and tutorials that promote discussion and interaction among the participants and do not serve primarily to promote the work of well-established researchers.
To help facilitate best practices in organizing online workshops and tutorials the accepted workshop organizers will be required to attend a meeting with the workshop chairs prior to the conference. This meeting will introduce the organizers to the tools the conference will be using for hosting workshops in a consistent manner and will enable different workshop organizers to share their innovations with enough time for other workshops to adapt their format.
Specifically, we welcome and will give priority to:
Fully elaborated proposals with confirmed, high-quality, diverse invited speakers as well as solicited posters or presentations. Specifically we encourage organizers to consider, among others, diversity of presenters in terms of:
Seniority and academic rank (consider inviting senior PhD students and postdocs whose work you appreciate instead of just professors and senior researchers)
Gender
Race and ethnicity
Geographic location
Industry, government, and academia
Innovative event structures that will encourage discussion and interaction among the participants. Previous examples include structured debates or groupings of senior and junior researchers for brainstorming of new topics for research.
Proposals from communities that have not traditionally participated at RSS but are relevant to robotics science, robotics systems, the practice and philosophy of the discipline.
Tutorials focusing on tools commonly used in work presented at RSS or showcasing new libraries which the community can leverage.
Workshops that will encourage analysis and reflection on topics and issues that formulate challenge problems and that promote discussion, debates, and long-term vision.
We anticipate hosting 10–15 total workshops and tutorials. In order to ensure participation in the workshops we ask that speakers agree to participate in no more than 3 accepted workshops and tutorials.
In addition to traditional workshops, there will be a special “outlier” track that pushes the boundaries of academic workshops by examining ideas that are (i) important for the field, and (ii) poorly treated by the formal peer-review process. The track will explore unconventional formats and topics that eschew current orthodoxy.
We expect proposals to be approximately 2–3 pages in length, and no more than 5 pages. The proposal template can be found at this link.
Workshop proposals should be submitted via EasyChair.