This workshop will focus on the cognitive aspects of robotic surgery: what are the aspects of an artificially intelligent robotic system for surgery? Given the large breadth in surgical robotics today, a focus on cognitive aspects of the robotic systems and the artificial intelligence underlying their behaviors is increasingly important to focus on; a parallel to the discussion of self-driving cars, another area where human life is in the hands of the AI. To explore this, the following key areas will be the primary focus of the workshop:

• Perception: ​the use of sensory feedback from optical, force, etc. modalities to perform localization of the robot and the tissues of interest, context of the situation, and etc. Segmentation, tracking, reconstruction, fusion, robot estimation, etc.

• Inference:​ strategies for contextual understanding of the environment and the robot. This falls between perception and planning and may generalize beyond the systems themselves to understanding more about the clinical process, surgeons, etc.

• Planning and Automation:​ use of perception and inferencing to generate and follow plans to perform an intervention or diagnostic procedure. Consideration of human-in-the-loop, co-robot and human-robot interactions, motion and task planning.

• Clinical, Practical, Social, and Ethical Implications:​ clinical perspectives of robotics and automation in surgery; practical issues of data availability and validation; considerations of impact and need, commercial value and market size; ethical implications of increased automation and robotic tools in the operating room.

We invite extended abstracts with an optional short video for spotlight presentations during our interactive session . Submissions can be original research or late-breaking results that fall under the scope of the workshop. An award sponsored by Intuitive Surgical Inc. will be given to the best submitted abstract.

Submission Details:

• Deadline is October 16th and notification of acceptance is on October 26th

• Submission Link: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/CRS2020/Submission/Index

• Submission Instructions: complete a single submission with ONLY the extended abstract first. Then update the submission with the video as supplementary material.

• Extended abstract is 2 page maximum including references and should follow the IEEE Conference Templates [Latex, MS Word].

• Video length is limited to 30 seconds, kept under 50MB of file size, and of file format mp4, mpeg, or mpg

• Spotlight presentations for accepted abstracts will be done on 8-9AM PST on November 6th

All papers will be reviewed via single-blind review process: authors declare their names and affiliations in the manuscript for the reviewers to see, but reviewers do not know each other's identities, nor do the authors receive information about who has reviewed their manuscript. The submissions acceptance decision will be based on contribution, novelty, and overall content.