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