ICRA 2006

Status Report
Norman Caplan, General Chair
C. S. George Lee, General Co-Chair
Nikos Papanikolopoulos, Program Chair

October 2005
San Francisco, CA
ICRA 2006 Organizing Committee
General Chair:
Norman Caplan, Washington Univ.
Program Chair:
Nikos Papanikolopoulos, Univ. of
Minnesota
General Co-Chair:
C. S. George Lee, National Science
Foundation, USA
Program Co-Chairs:
Junku Yuh, National Science
Foundation, U.S.A.
Kevin Lynch, Northwestern Univ.
Bradley Nelson, ETL, Switzerland
Kostas Kyriakopoulos, NTUA, Greece
Katsushi Ikeuchi, Univ. of Tokyo
Minoru Asada, Osaka Univ.
Paolo Fiorini, Verona Univ. (Posters)
Finance Chair:
T.C. (Steve) Hsia, Univ. of CA, Davis
Awards Chair:
Yuan F. Zheng, Ohio State Univ.
Tutorials & Workshops Chair:
William Hamel, Univ. of Tenn.
Special Sessions Chair:
Wes Snyder, North Carolina State Univ.
Publications Chair:
C.L. Philip Chen, Univ. of Texas, San
Antonio
Local Arrangements Co-Chair:
Kimon Valavanis, Univ. of South Florida
Yi Guo, Univ. of Central Florida
Video Proceedings Chair:
Paul Oh, Drexel Univ.
Allison Okamura, Johns Hopkins Univ.
Exhibits Chair:
Ron Lumia, Univ. of New Mexico
Publicity Chair:
Yoky Matsuoka, Carnegie Mellon Univ.
Webmaster:
Denis Gracanin, Virginia Tech
 Hilton in the Walt Disney
World Resort
1751 Hotel Plaza Boulevard
Lake Buena Vista, FL
814 rooms total
15 session rooms + 3 society
meeting rooms + Exhibits +
Plenary session room
$147 singles/doubles + taxes
Committed 1525 room nights
Conference Date and Program
Day SUN MON TUE WED THU FRI SAT

Date 5/14 5/15 5/16 5/17 5/18 5/19 5/20

Sgl/Dbl 100 250 400 400 250 100 25

Technical Sessions:
Tuesday-Thursday, May 16-18, 2006
Tutorials and Workshops:
Monday (5/15) and Friday (5/19)
AdCom Meeting:
Friday, May 19, 2006
Conference Facilities (I)
Conference Facilities (II)
 Technical Program
Conference Theme: Humanitarian Robotics
2 Plenary Sessions in the afternoon and one Awards
Session (Separate from the Banquet)
High-quality paper sessions with a double-blind
review process (The goal is for 12 parallel tracks with
five papers each)
Tutorials/Workshops with renewed emphasis.
Workshops will be on Monday and tutorials on Friday
Panel Discussions
Poster Sessions during the first two days
Journal/Magazine special issues are planned
Special/Invited Sessions
Exhibits (+ competitions)
 Technical Program
Best Review Awards
Posters will be reviewed, similarly to papers
Posters will be in the proceedings but not in
IEEE Xplore. Posters are viewed as another
way to convey original ideas in their early
development phase.
Videos will be accompanied by poster
presentations.
TCs will have a more active role in the
program formation.
 Actual Numbers
1756 paper submissions (a record!!!).
123 poster submissions.
65 video submissions.
20 (6 from Europe, 6 from USA, 8 from
Asia) tutorial/workshop submissions +
IARP + Space Robotics(?).
2 special sessions proposals.
 Countries (50+)
USA, 482
Japan, 277
China, 119
France, 102
Canada, 99
Germany, 83
South Korea, 76
Spain, 65
Australia, 60
Italy, 53
.
Brunei Darussalam, 1
Popular and Unpopular
Keywords
Mobile Robots (222)
Motion and Path Planning (181)
Robot Vision and Recognition(113)
Multi-Robot Systems(106)
Computer Vision (87)
Humanoids (83)
.
Automation: Demining and Excavation (1)
 Program Committee
Goal is to have at least two quality and in-
depth reviews per paper.
222 confirmed PC members with their
keywords inserted.
4 additional confirmed PC members with
specific requirements (topic-wise, etc.).
25 Poster PC members.
25 confirmed Grand Reviewers.
Each member will review 15 papers max.
Forty additional reviewers are on reserve.
 Program Committee
78 PC members are from Europe. One
resigned after we gave the deadline
extension.
48 PC members are from Asia. A record
number of no responses came from
Asia (17 total).
96 PC members are from the Americas.
 Observations
The server handled the load with no problem. The
complaints received were few. In the last hour, the
server accepted more than 100 papers.
More than 500 papers had problems with fonts,
containing identity revealing information, duplication,
wrong files, or plain cases of plagiarism, etc.
In five days, we fixed almost all of them through the
exchange of more than 1000 emails.
Hurricane Rita created additional issues.
All the PC chairs, myself, and 10 of my students
worked day and night on this front.
 Observations
Despite the attempts of some individuals to question
ICRAs quality, ICRA remains our premier conference.
The numbers and the quality speak to this fact.
Cheating/plagiarism is rampant. For example,
Professor X from Mexico submitted 8 papers whose
differences are in the titles and the abstract (paper
IDs: 265 1130 1132 1137 1158 1176 1551 1746).
The load to the reviewers is high.
Double-blind review can help in the quality and is
feasible even at a conference of this size.
 Observations
Till September 16 (midnight), we had
863 papers and 36 posters.
More than 1200 papers were submitted
or revised between September 16 and
September 21.
The deadline extension affected
positively the quality based on some
initial indications.
Conference Publications
DVD proceedings with embedded video
clips (Philip Chen)
Video proceedings (Paul Oh)
Conference digest (Nikos, Lee)
Exhibits layout and handout (Lumia)
Live demo + K-12 Visit (Local
Arrangements Chair)
 Finance and Budget
Finance Chair: Steve Hsia
Conference Bank Account
Account with Bank of America, Davis, CA
Account name is IEEE ICRA 2006

Reimbursement Process
Fill out an IEEE expense report (excel file)
 To Do List
Online Paper Submission (Start2 with double-blind
review) (by July 2005) DONE!!!
Form Program Committee (by June 2005) DONE!!!
Paper Submission, Deadline: Sept. 21, 2005 DONE!!
Paper Review Process (5 weeks) IN PROGRESS!!!
Executive PC meeting (Third weekend of Dec. 2005)
in Orlando, FL
Notification of Paper Acceptance: Jan. 2006
Final Paper Due: Feb. 2006
IEEE CMS will handle registrations