Robotics Retrospectives

The RSS Retrospectives Workshop is about reflecting on robotics research. In addition to publishing meta-analysis papers on the state of the field, this workshop will continue the exploration of a new kind of scientific publication, called retrospectives.

The workshop will be held on Sunday, July 12th in a virtual format.

Signpost

The live panels will be streamed using zoom through the RSS Pheedloop where you find the zoom + gathertown link.

Prerecorded talks and spotlights can be found on our youtube channel.

Schedule can be found here.

Submit questions for the live panel through Slido.

Accepted retrospectives can be found here.

What is a retrospective?

A retrospective is written about a single paper, by that paper’s author, and takes the form of an informal blog post. The purpose of a retrospective is to answer the question:

“What should readers of this paper know now, that is not in the original publication?”

The overarching goal of retrospectives is to do better science, increase the openness and accessibility of the robotics field, and to show that it’s okay to make mistakes.

Check out the submission here!

Speakers

Recorded talks by the speakers are available on our youtube channel. Live panel discussions and poster sessions will be streamed through the RSS PheedLoop.

How do I submit?

There are two tracks for submissions to the workshop:

1. Retrospectives track. This is for submitting retrospectives about your own past papers. They can include new perspectives on the work since publication, a discussion of the strengths and limitations of the work, or acknowledgement of errors in the original manuscript. The goal is to be as open and honest about your past work as possible.
2. Meta-analysis track. We also encourage the submission of meta-analysis of a small set of related papers (not necessarily your own). This can include observations of recent trends, a discussion of changes to the ‘common knowledge’ in the field, or something else. The goal is to spark discussion about how we do research.

Check out the Call for Papers for more detail on each track! To submit to either of the two tracks, go to https://openreview.net/group?id=roboticsfoundation.org/RSS/2020/Workshop/RobRetro

Check out the accepted submission here!

Important Dates

Paper submission deadline: May 31

Author notification: June 12

Workshop date: July 12

The idea for this workshop was inspired by the Machine Learning Retrospectives Workshop @ NeurIPS. For some inspiration, you can find the accepted retrospectives here. This is a good example of retrospective on lessons learned from a previous paper, and this is an example of a meta-analysis.

Submissions can be from any sub-field of robotics or related fields of interest to the Robotics community, including Computer Vision, Machine Learning or others. The main goal of the workshop is to widen what is publishable in Robotics, and to introduce researchers to more public reflections of their work as part of an ongoing effort to disseminate scientific knowledge more effectively and openly.