CVPR Daily - Tuesday

feet being occupied by vendors. At a lot of conferences, they’re there to sell to one another; here, they’re here to collect future employees. Do you have a message for first-time attendees here at CVPR? You shouldn’t be embarrassed to introduce yourself to anybody. In my capacity as university professor, I’m always looking for new students who might be interested in doing a PhD at the University of Maryland. In my capacity as an Amazon employee, I’m always interested in looking at people who may be good employees for the organisation. This is going to be true for anybody else here at the meeting. Sure, you come here to see people you know – there’s a socialisation aspect – but if you’re a new person here, it’s an opportunity to create your own network with other people in your generation and an opportunity for you to meet some of the more established people in the field. Don’t be shy. Walk up, say hello, start talking about what you’re doing. If they’re busy, they’ll tell you. If they’re not, they’ll be happy to engage in a conversation. What can you tell us about the organisation of the conference? The only reason we can run a conference of this scale is because of the fantastic support we get from people like Nicole and her staff. They’re just unbelievable. I did all the logistics in 1988 myself, including how many pots of coffee we should have in the afternoon breaks. That would just be impossible today. Without the kind of institutional memory that Nicole and her staff have from one meeting to the next, and their people skills in dealing with endless problems coming in at a machine-gun rate, the whole thing would just collapse. They’re incredible. Thinking ahead to CVPR 2020, what would you say to your successors? Well, good luck, because if we went from 6,000 attendees to 9,300 this year, that kind of growth can’t go on forever. It’s just biologically impossible, but if it goes on for another year and you’re looking at attendees of 10-12,000 in Seattle, it’s going to be very difficult to manage. We had a few political problems on the way, and you’ve got to be very sensitive to those. Of course, we’re an academic community. This is not a trade show. This is a real research conference and I think everybody who’s involved in the organising of these conferences wants to have the broadest participation possible. They want to stay away from politics 100 per cent and give everybody a chance to participate. You’ve got to be very sensitive to things that have happened. Also, this year, we cut off registration, but we weren’t organised enough to make sure that the workshops knew that they couldn’t tell anybody else that they could come to the conference. We had a few people who were justifiably upset who got very late workshop invitations for one reason or another. They were really excited, bought their plane tickets, but then weren’t able to register. We know we’re going to hit our registration limit in 2020 and we have to do a better job of getting the whole thing organised so that we meet expectations and don’t disappoint anyone. We’re close to 10,000 people here all together being part of or contributing to the organisation of the meeting. We’re glad you’re all here. Enjoy it and learn a lot! “ Don’t be shy. Walk up, say hello!” 5 DAILY CVPR Tuesday Larry Davis