We thought about throwing all of these fantastic videos from the 2014 AAAI Video Competition into last week's Video Friday, but then decided that they deserved their own post. AAAI is the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, which held its annual conference late last month in Canada. According to the AAAI website, "the goal of the competition is to show the world how much fun AI is by documenting exciting artificial intelligence advances in research, education, and application." Fun? We like fun! SHOW US THE FUN.
The winners of the competition receive "Shakey" awards, honoring SRI's famous robot Shakey, which appeared in this video in 1969:
Do any of this year's AAAI video winners come anywhere close to this pioneering pink-hued video with its compelling soundtrack and long-haired researchers? You be the judge. [Spoilers: not a chance, because the sixties!]
Best Robot Video: How to Engineer a Dog
Marco Hutter, Mark Hoepflinger, Christian Gehring, Michael Bloesch, Mischa Kolbe, and Roland Siegwart
ASL, ETH Zurich
Best Short Video: Autonomous Social Head Gaze
Vasant Srinivasan, Zachary Henkel, and Robin R. Murphy
Texas A&M University
Most Entertaining Video: Overfitting: Machine Learning Music Video
Michael L. Littman, Charles Isbell, and Aaron Gross
Brown University, Georgia Tech, Udacity
Best Student Video: Telepresence for People With Communication Impairment
Gyula Vörös, András Sárkány, András Németh, Anita Verő, Gyula Szaffner, and András Lőrincz
Eotvos Lorand University
My Personal Favorite: The Furlough Gambit
Anthony M. Harrison, Laura M. Hiatt, William L. Adams, Wallace E. Lawson, Sangeet S. Khemlani, Franklin P. Tamborello, Samuel N. Blissard, and J. Gregory Trafton
U.S. Naval Research Laboratory
And a Couple More Because Why Not:
CoCoCo, Coffee Collecting Companion
Paul Hanzal, Anne Rubruck, Sohaib Younis, Sascha Winde, Azad Aminian, Jyothi Yalpi, Sathya Kuppusami, and Stefan Thomas
University of Hamburg
What's So Great About Autonomous Vehicles?
James Fu Guo Ming, Karl Damkjær 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, and Emilio Frazzoli
SMART, AAU, NUS, MIT, UniPi, SUTD, CSIRO, ITU
[ AAAI Videos ] via [ RoboHub ]
Evan Ackerman is a senior editor at IEEE Spectrum. Since 2007, he has written over 6,000 articles on robotics and technology. He has a degree in Martian geology and is excellent at playing bagpipes.