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ICRA Update “Everyone speaks about quality but quality needs personal commitment. People have to walk the talk.” Working with more than 300 dedicated volunteers, 2006 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) Program Chair Nikos Papanikolopoulos has spent the better part of a year working to ensure that the Orlando, Florida, conference will have the quality that IEEE Robotics and Automation Society members expect and demand from the Society’s flagship conference. Submissions to ICRA 2006 included 1,756 papers, 122 posters, and 65 videos. By early December, two weeks before the meeting of the Program Committee in Orlando, 99% of the reviews were in. The 280 Program Committee members had completed 3,700 reviews (an average of 13 papers each), ensuring that each paper received at least two reviews. If either or both of the reviewers did not respond, the paper was reassigned. Papers that received conflicting reviews (e.g., one “accept” and one “reject”) got a third or even fourth review. Papanikolopoulos reported that by far the majority of reviewers were responsive and conscientious and submitted thoughtful reviews. He asked those few who submitted “one liners” to resubmit or extend their comments, and most reviewers complied. If not, additional reviewers were sought. He also recruited a “great group of students” who helped him and the Program Committee check for plagiarism, security issues, and violations of the double-blind review guidelines (which were initiated this year) and helped reassign papers when reviewers were unresponsive. The Program Committee has been working on logistics of managing the review process for more than a year to ensure that the process was thorough, consistent, and fair. Papanikolopoulos solicited suggestions from experienced individuals respected throughout the robotics and automation community: John Hollerbach and George Lee, the ICRA 2006 cogeneral chairs, in addition to the regional program cochairs, Jukhu Yuh and Kevin Lynch (The Americas), Bradley Nelson and Kostas Kyriakopoulos (Europe), Katsushi Ikeuchi and Minoru Asada (Asia), and other members of the organizing committee who, according to Papanikolopolous, worked “day and night” the last few weeks of the review period. The final acceptance rate was 39%. On 18 and 19 December, the ICRA Program Committee organized the accepted papers into more than 110 sessions with six papers each, covering almost every topic in robotics and automation. Innovations for ICRA 2006 include instituting doubleblind reviews to ensure that reviewers are not unduly influenced by the reputation of the authors. ICRA 2006 will also include poster sessions for the first time, under the leadership of Poster Chair Paolo Fiorini and his committee. Posters will be in the ICRA Proceedings but not in IEEE Xplore this year. Posters are viewed as another way to convey original ideas in their early development phase. Another innovation this year is a special category of papers by undergraduateand master’s-level students. Two education sessions at ICRA will feature 12 papers that were accepted in this category. While acknowledging that the job of program chair for a conference the size of ICRA is hard work and “takes a tremendous toll on your time,” Papanikolopoulos says it has its rewards. “We will not be done until the curtains are down in mid-May, when people will give their final verdict about our efforts. We can then relax, but I will personally miss this global overview of the best work in robotics and automation,” he says. “It makes me feel far better about our field to know that we are progressing with leaps and bound.”