Watch the videos from the AI Video Competition

A large crowd of experts in artificial intelligence gathered around the AAAI Video Competition Award Ceremony before catching their flights, or enjoying one last night in Québec City. The competition aims to spread the word about research and applications in AI through exciting educational videos. For this eighth edition, co-chaired by Mauro Birattari and me, 22 videos were submitted, 14 were accepted, and 5 received awards based on peer review. Videos of researchers singing Michael Jackson’s Thriller, robot dogs, neural networks, telepresence robots for the disabled, and insight into HRI had the crowd laughing and cheering. Since some of the winners were not there to receive the mythical Shakey awards, named after the famous robot from Stanford, we also viewed some cute acceptance speeches delivered by robots. We’ve added all the videos below, and in our YouTube playlist. Keep an eye out for next year’s edition in Austin Texas!

Best Video

Evolving Neural Networks That Are Both Modular and Regular
Joost Huizinga, Jean-Baptiste Mouret, Jeff Clune
University of Wyoming

Best Short Video

Autonomous Social Head Gaze
Vasant Srinivasan, Zachary Henkel, and Robin R. Murphy
Texas A&M University

Best Robot Video

How to engineer a dog
Marco Hutter, Mark Hoepflinger, Christian Gehring, Michael Bloesch, Mischa Kolbe, Roland Siegwart
ASL, ETH Zurich

Best Student Video

Telepresence for People with Communication Impairment
Gyula Vörös, András Sárkány, András Németh, Anita Verő, Gyula Szaffner, András Lőrincz
Eotvos Lorand University

Most Entertaining Video

Overfitting: Machine Learning Music Video
Michael L. Littman, Charles Isbell, Aaron Gross
Brown University, Georgia Tech, Udacity

The Furlough Gambit
Anthony M. Harrison, Laura M. Hiatt, William L. Adams, Wallace E. Lawson, Sangeet S. Khemlani, Franklin P. Tamborello, Samuel N. Blissard, J. Gregory Trafton
U.S. Naval Research Laboratory

What’s so great about autonomous vehicles?
James Fu Guo Ming, Karl Damkjer Hansen, Riccardo Incaini, Volkan Sezer, Pedro Vaz Teixeira, Katarzyna Anna Marczuk, Scott Pendleton, Tawit Uthaicharoenpong, Marcello Scarnecchia, Chong Zhuang Jie, Thommen George Karimpanal, Valerio Varricchio, Qin Baoxing, Tirthankar Bandyopadhyay, Daniela Rus, Marcelo H. Jr Ang, Emilio Frazzoli
SMART, AAU, NUS, MIT, UniPi, SUTD, CSIRO, ITU

CoCoCo, Coffee Collecting Companion
Paul Hanzal, Anne Rubruck, Sohaib Younis, Sascha Winde, Azad Aminian, Jyothi Yalpi, Sathya Kuppusami, Stefan Thomas
University of Hamburg

Rapyuta: The RoboEarth Cloud Engine
Gajamohan Mohanarajah, Dominique Hunziker, Markus Waibel, and Raffaello D’Andrea
IDSC, ETH Zurich

Human-Robot Interaction Planning
Sven Parusel, Hannes Widmoser, Saskia Golz, Tobias Ende, Nico
Blodow, Matteo Saveriano, Kai Krieger, Alexis Maldonado, Ingo Kresse, Roman Weitschat, Dongheui Lee, Michael Beetz, and Sami Haddadin
DLR, IRT, TUM, Uni Bremen

Francois Adam, Nirina Deveaux, Amandine Diricq, Gleb Goussarov, Victor Riedinger, Roman Miletitch
Ecole Polytechnique de Bruxelles

Encouraging Creative Thinking in Robots Improves Their Ability to Solve Challenging Problems
Jingyu Li, Jed Storie, Jeff Clune
University of Wyoming

Planning for Decentralized Control of Multiple Robots Under Uncertainty
Gabriel Cruz, Christopher Amato, George Konidaris, Christopher Maynor, Jonathan How, Leslie Kaelbling
MIT

Cloud-based Collaborative 3D Mapping in Real-Time with Low-Cost Robots
Vladyslav Usenko, Gajamohan Mohanarajah, Mayank Singh, Dominique Hunziker, Dhananjay Sathe, Markus Waibel, and Raffaello D’Andrea
IDSC, ETH Zurich

Sabine Hauert is President of Robohub and Associate Professor at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory

Sabine Hauert is President of Robohub and Associate Professor at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory