CVPR Daily - Thursday

A message to the community from Greg Mori from Borealis AI and General Co-Chair this year 20 DAILY CVPR Thursday Message from a General co-Chair The focus of this year’s conference has been on building an interactive in-person experience. It’s been four years since I’ve been at a computer vision conference, and our community has learned a lot about what works best in a virtual versus an in-person world. When planning for this year, we’ve tried to provide an experience optimized for that in-person interaction . I want to highlight a few things that we’ve done. On Tuesday, we had five community-driven social events . Individuals gathered in groups to formulate these meetings around different topics, and the conference provided a space for them. It’s super important because as our field has grown – we’ve got more than 8,000 registered attendees this year – that growth is fantastic, but it makes it difficult to meet people. It’s a strange feeling that being too big makes it more isolating, but if you’re new, you don’t have a network of friends to hang out with. The idea behind these social occasions is to break the conference into smaller, more manageable groups where 40-50 people interested in a topic can come together. The five social events included Black in AI , for people from and supporters of the Black community; Diversity and Inclusion , for those who have either run or are interested in running D&I initiatives; How to Negotiate Industry Offers , for students or others who want some support with that; an Ask Me Anything session with senior faculty and industry leaders; and an event for people interested in startups , whether they’re founders or people who want to learn more about what it’s like. We landed on these topics after Yale Song , a wonderful organizing committee member, put out a public call earlier this year saying if you want to organize a social event, put together a team and a proposal, and we’ll select the ones we think will be good. That was great because, top-down, it’s hard to achieve this. Who am I to say what the most interesting social thing is? Let the community decide! Something special about the CVPR community is that it’s open and welcoming to new research topics. In the workshops I attended this week, we heard a lot about how people have drifted over time from a pure geometry focus to a heavy recognition focus, to a machine learning focus, to large language models . All of this is part of computer vision. That’s a real strength of our field. Looking at these