Dear SSL-CommunityAs it’s approximately 4 months until the competition
starts, we wanted to share some information on this year's competition
and qualification process.
Short summary: Preliminary Team Qualification is public,
(self-)plagiarism is not allowed in TDPs, and failing to review properly
can result in disqualification starting with next year.There’s still no
definitive reply by the LOC regarding venue and or additional
requirements. I will share any information with you as soon as I get
it.All teams that submitted qualification material should have a result
for the Preliminary Team Qualification by now. If not, please check your
submitted contact email or get in touch with the OC via our mailing list.
There are fewer division A teams competing than we hoped. While we do
not have a final solution for this yet, division A teams should prepare
their AI to be able to play against division B teams. While we will look
for ways to use both physical fields and to facilitate as many division
A matches as possible, playing a tournament with just 5 teams seems not
very appealing to us.
There were two major issues regarding the TDPs I wanted to address:
1.
Plagiarism
We decided to take a hard stance on plagiarism this year.
Plagiarism is not accepted in scientific
publications, and should not be accepted for our TDPs.
This is also true for your own TDP from previous years. Except for a narrow
exception regarding introducing the SSL, your team and your previous
results,
there should not be any sentence or figure just copied from your
previous TDPs.
You can cite your TDP for a very important sentence or figure, or you
can use your
previous TDP as a reference to build on and write a very short summary.
But there should not be sections or figures just copied from your last
paper.
Remember that TDPs are supposed to be useful to other teams. Repeating
yourself
by copying your old work wastes your readers time if they already read
your previous
TDP. It is not the OCs job to cut out the copied parts and judge if the
remaining parts
are still more than the mandated minimum of pages. It is the team's job
to avoid any
plagiarism. Also remember that you are supposed to talk about newthings. You
should not even be tempted to copy your previous years content because by
definition that content cannot be new. If you cannot say anything new
regarding a specific part of your system, do not mention it at all.
There is only one exception: If your already published work is important
for one of the issues you did change, cite it if you want to share your
change.
2.
Bamberger Hörnchen
To assess the quality of our review-process, I invented my new team,
called ‘Bamberger Hörnchen’ and created a TDP for them. They
participated in the normal review process (so three teams had to review
their TDP, and I got their reviews for my TDP, and I wrote the reviews
they had to do). However, the team does not exist (and one reviewer
correctly identified the missing qualification video, which made me very
happy :) ), so it was not put on the official list. We’ll share the TDP
on our qualification webpage soon, accompanied by a short explanation of
its major issues that should have been raised during review. While two
reviewers correctly identified at least parts of the problem with the
paper, the third did not. There will be no further action this year, but
it is plausible that we might do something like this again to make sure
teams take reviewing seriously. Remember that the OC has the power to
disqualify teams in the future for not properly reviewing your peers. If
you are scared to criticize the team in the public questions, you can
always use the comment to TC/OC to mention critical defects with the TDP
in private. And remember reviews are anonymous, so the team you are
criticizing is not going to know who said it.
(And yes, I did implement the software I talked about in the Bamberger
Hörnchen TDP. At least the software, the rest would have been too
expensive for my taste.)
That’s all for now,Tobias HeinekenOC for Robocup 2022 Thailand
