A Canadian startup has made the process of getting a COVID-19 vaccine much easier with a robot that injects a shot directly into the muscle without the use of a needle. Developers of the Cobi robot, designed at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, say the droid has successfully performed the first autonomous robotic intramuscular injection. Cobi relies on a high-pressure jet of serum that passes through an opening in the skin the width of a human hair. Using LiDAR sensors, the same technology employed by autonomous vehicles to map the road, Cobi makes a model of the patient's body and AI-based software determines the optimal site for injection. 'We outfitted Cobi to use a needle-free injection technology and to demonstrate that patients could receive intramuscular injections, such as vaccines, without needles and no involvement from a healthcare professional,' said Tim Lasswell, co-founder and CEO of Cobionix in a statement.

Constructing a good conference schedule for a large multi-track conference needs to take into account the preferences and constraints of organizers, authors, and attendees. Creating a schedule which has fewer conflicts for authors and attendees, and thematically coherent sessions is a challenging task. Cobi introduced an alternative approach to conference scheduling by engaging the community to play an active role in the planning process. The current Cobi pipeline consists of committee-sourcing and author-sourcing to plan a conference schedule. We further explore the design space of community-sourcing by introducing attendee-sourcing -- a process that collects input from conference attendees and encodes them as preferences and constraints for creating sessions and schedule. For CHI 2014, a large multi-track conference in human-computer interaction with more than 3,000 attendees and 1,000 authors, we collected attendees’ preferences by making available all the accepted papers at the conference on a paper recommendation tool we built called Confer, for a period of 45 days before announcing the conference program (sessions and schedule). We compare the preferences marked on Confer with the preferences collected from Cobi’s author-sourcing approach. We show that attendee-sourcing can provide insights beyond what can be discovered by author-sourcing. For CHI 2014, the results show value in the method and attendees’ participation. It produces data that provides more alternatives in scheduling and complements data collected from other methods for creating coherent sessions and reducing conflicts.

Creating a schedule for a large multi-track conference requires considering the preferences and constraints of organizers, authors, and attendees. Traditionally, a few dedicated organizers manage the size and complexity of the schedule with limited information and coverage. Cobi presents an alternative approach to conference scheduling by engaging the entire community to take active roles in the planning process. It consists of a collection of crowdsourcing applications that elicit preferences and constraints from the community, and software that enable organizers and other community members to take informed actions based on collected information.