CVPR Daily - Monday

To our first- and second-time attendees, a warm welcome. I know it can be overwhelming. We have so many papers and so many attendees that it can be easy to feel lost in this virtual crowd. But the computer vision community is a welcoming one. The content is there, and it will be there for months and years, so don’t feel like you have to absorb everything right now. Take the time to make fewer but deeper interactions. Try to show up to one of the papers that you’re interested in, take part in the live chat, and talk to the authors. Similarly, there will be social networking events, and use those to talk to any of us, including myself or the other organizers. Believe it or not, we are just regular people, and we’d love to hear your perspective as a first-time attendee. Just remember that the interactions we have are beneficial to both sides. Whenever I meet a student for the first time, I learn something from them in the same way that I hope they learn from me. Don’t feel intimidated and don’t feel that you have to live up to some unrealistic standard. Bring honest questions and have a discussion that is good for both sides. Looking back over your career to date, if you could, what piece of advice would you give your younger self? I would tell him that you have to be comfortable with change. In the mid-1990s, I was working on neural networks for self-driving cars. At that point neural nets died, self-driving cars died, and the field I was in evaporated, but now things are coming back in different areas, so you have to be comfortable with change and you have to be willing to learn. Another thing is you’ll always be making decisions given incomplete information. The consequences of those decisions will persist, but don’t beat yourself up saying I wish I had done this, or I wish I had done that. It’s much better to appreciate the process and see it as a journey. Not everything is within your control. Don’t feel that the world is much better when you are a more senior person – senior or junior, there is always something to be savoured wherever you are on your journey. From your experiences of in-person CVPRs in the past, do you have any funny stories you could share with us? I remember at CVPR 2005, the poster session was held on boats, and some people started to think the boat was rocking even though it wasn’t . That was something that stayed with them! They said it was the first time they felt seasick during a poster session. We’ve had plenty of outdoor events and been rained on. All these things in that moment feel as if something has gone wrong, but really they’re shared experiences that in the end we can all laugh about. I hope we have them again very soon. How about colleagues for whom this is not their first CVPR? Maybe it’s their fifth, or tenth even, and they’re still not sold on the idea of a virtual event... 11 DAILY CVPR Monday from the General co-Chair