CVPR Daily - Monday

23 DAILY CVPR Monday today. It’s really advanced the number of applications and increased access to this technology to more people, which is amazing. Unfortunately, along with that access, doesn’t come the same level of expertise, the same knowledge into the limitations of the systems or how they were intended to be deployed. My focus with robustness is reducing the necessity of that knowledge to be able to deploy these systems in a reliable way that won’t do harm, especially when it’s deployed in safety critical applications or in applications that are going to have real impact on society. That’s where I feel like we can have a big impact on society and really allow this accessibility to come with trustworthiness. Would you change anything about academia based on your experience? There’s a lot of rejection in academia. With students in your lab, you want to protect them. You would love it if they didn’t have to go through those same rejections you do, but it’s a fact of the field. A little bit of rejection is a good thing. You are proud of your students’ work. You want them to be successful. It’s quite painful, if for various different reasons, things don’t work out. What impacts you more? A rejected paper or an accepted one? I’m not a psychologist, but I think there have been a lot of studies that show that you need many more positive events to counteract a negative one. Unfortunately, the balance is flipped in academia. Maybe rejection makes you fully appreciate the importance of success. It’s important to be at least a little humble and have some rejection. There’s some luck to the process, as you know, especially with such a large field and such variance in the reviewing. You can easily get very different responses to the same paper submitted twice. There is some luck involved. One thing I try to do is to be overly enthusiastic and try to celebrate as a group, just to make it a little more meaningful to people. Oh! Describe this scenario! [ laughs ] Well, the last year has totally changed. The majority of my time as a professor has been remote because of COVID. Actually, the first paper acceptances happened during COVID. The papers were submitted a week before the pandemic. To celebrate after the papers were submitted, not even accepted, we took a break from lab meetings. Everybody took a break and played some pool, to hang out instead. When it was accepted, most of the celebration had to be remote. It was on Slack with emojis, different messages, and maybe different virtual hours and virtual parties. Only recently, we’ve been able to have small parties in person and hopefully more of that in the future. Judy Hoffman