Hauser, Adve Take Advantage of Opportunities at Top Conferences

7/26/2022 Aaron Seidlitz, Illinois CS

Earlier this summer, Illinois CS professor Kris Hauser served as program chair for a top conference, Robotics: Science and Systems; meanwhile, Sarita Adve gave a keynote speech about ILLIXR and immersive computing at another top conference, the International Symposium on Computer Architecture.

Written by Aaron Seidlitz, Illinois CS

After serving as program chair for the Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2022 conference late last month, Illinois Computer Science professor Kris Hauser described the opportunity as one he jumped at as soon as it became possible.

Kris Hauser
Kris Hauser

He has a long history with the leading robotics conference, considering he has regularly attended since submitting and publishing his first paper with it in 2009.

“The quality of papers, reviewing, and discussion has always impressed me,” Hauser said. “RSS has a long tradition of upholding high academic standards and deserves its prestigious place in the robotics field, and it was an honor to help maintain that reputation.”

As program chair, Hauser oversaw the review process for papers submitted. This provided an opportunity to think deeply about the criteria RSS emphasizes during the review process.

“It’s exciting to experiment with how the process can influence the conference, and hopefully, the field, in a positive direction,” Hauser said. “For example, I feel strongly that more academic robotics research should be grounded in real-world robot systems, but as academics we tend to shy away from that type of ‘systems’ work because it’s hard, time consuming, and expensive.

“This RSS, I revised the review criteria to better assess researchers who really ‘walk the walk’ and build robots that work out of the lab. Will this nudge the field in the right direction? Time will tell.”

Additionally, Hauser shouldered the responsibility of “shepherding the conference” back to an in-person experience. After careful consideration and preparation, over 85 percent of attendees were in-person, making the long trip from Europe, Japan, Australia, and elsewhere.

Adve continues to share the story of ILLIXR

Sarita Adve
Sarita Adve

Fellow Illinois CS professor Sarita Adve continues to promote the power of ILLIXR – a first-of-its-kind open source testbed and consortium for the broad Extended Reality (XR) community, which encompasses virtual (VR), augmented (AR) and mixed reality (MR) – to relevant research communities.

This time, Adve delivered an inspiring keynote speech “Enabling the Immersive Era of Computing” at the top computer architecture conference, the 2022 International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA).

Adve gave the opening day keynote for the first in-person ISCA in three years on June 20, in New York City. With 900 people registered, the energy of an in-person meeting was palpable. Adve’s keynote described how computing is at the brink of a new immersive era, which will be as transformative as the previous major eras of computing, including mainframe, personal, web/cloud, mobile, and now immersive. She went on to show how enabling this new era requires a new style of systems research that adopts end-to-end user quality-of-experience driven design; cross-system codesign from semiconductor technologies to algorithms; and integration of the end user device, the edge, and the cloud.

Adve explained the primary challenges to XR systems and how ILLIXR is well positioned to help the community solve these challenges. She described the large variety of research projects already using ILLIXR today, showcasing how ILLIXR provides “a rich playground for systems research.”

Most heartening to Adve was the applause from the audience when she acknowledged the persistence of her students, many of whom were in the audience. This group faced numerous challenges along the way before their work was finally accepted as an IEEE Micro top pick from the 2021 architecture conferences and the subject of an ISCA keynote.

“The keynote was well received, and my students and I had many discussions with ISCA attendees,” Adve said. “All of this exposure and excitement in our work certainly serves as a shot in the arm for my research group, motivating us to keep striving to solve these difficult problems. This is what forms a ten year research agenda for us, as we try to make computing benefit society in a positive way.”


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This story was published July 26, 2022.