CVPR Daily - Tuesday

Larry, CVPR 2019 is an exceptional CVPR. What are your first impressions? My first impression is just the scale is tremendous. It’s unbelievable. I was the general chair of CVPR 1988 in Ann Arbor, Michigan – I’ve done it a few times – and at that meeting we had at most 125 papers presented and several hundred people. The single largest expense the meeting incurred was Federal Express to mail out hard copy versions of the papers to the reviewers. The whole thing was just tiny and small and intimate. No one got lost at the convention center. No, nobody got lost at the convention center! Everybody knew everybody else. Finding somebody was just not a problem. Certainly, it’s a challenge here navigating the meeting. You have hundreds of workshops and tutorials. Which ones do you go to? Luckily all the material is available in one form or another online. You can review it after the conference. There’s no way you can see it all at the meeting. There’s no way any one person could see it or absorb it all, but for those things that you’re interested in you’ve just got to give up on the possibility of seeing it all while you’re here and go through it after the conference. How to make the right choices, so that attendees can at least find the best for them? The best is hard. What I try to do is go to the sessions in which the best papers are being presented. Pick an oral session. Sit there. Going back and forth between them is going to be really problematic. There are good papers everywhere – not only at the oral sessions but also at poster sessions. People tend to move around listening to the famous people that speak at the workshops. I do that myself. What do you see from a technology point of view that is completely different now from Ann Arbor 1988? Well, it’s not even comparable. I don’t think we had a single industrial sponsor in 1988. There were only a few niche industries in which people were doing computer vision. Some type of early industrial inspection systems and a little bit of surveillance, but really not very much back then. Today, if you walk the exhibit floor, you just see this dizzying array of companies with interesting applications. This is mostly social media and autonomous systems. The opportunities for young people today in the field are fantastic. That’s why we have hundreds of thousands of square General Chair - Larry Davis 4 DAILY CVPR Tuesday Welcome