HRI-US organized the Second Annual Workshop on "The Curious Minded Machine" (CMM) initiative on October 3-4, 2019. In this workshop, scientists and students from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Washington, University of California Santa Cruz, and University of Pennsylvania presented state-of-the-art results on developing intelligent systems with a human-like sense of curiosity. The workshop series is a yearly culmination of the corresponding Honda Network of Excellence, which aims at creating machines that independently grow their own knowledge in an open-ended fashion. See the following link for details on the CMM initiative: https://cmm.usa.honda-ri.com/ .

The two-day workshop featured a number of technical sessions that brought together students, scientists and engineers from participating institutions and HRI-US.   We discussed a number of new collaborations, paper ideas, and next steps among the participants. The talks and presentations spanned a wide range of topics and clearly demonstrated the fundamental nature of "curiosity". Among other topics, the participants discussed the manifestations of curiosity in perception, skill learning, navigation, and symbolic reasoning. Exciting presentations by postdoctoral scholars and graduate students were a vital component of this workshop and contributed to its overall collaborative spirit. The participants also discussed potential prototypes and demos that will highlight the final output of the three-year project.