Computer Vision News - July 2018

To begin with, we had an incredible set of organizers (see previous page), from geographically distributed institutions at 4 different time zones, with a maximum of 9 hours difference. It was an honor and a pleasure to work with those brilliant researchers, whom I feel close enough to call my academic sisters. WiCV was held for the first time at CVPR 2015. Over the years, the attendance and quality of submissions to WiCV significantly increased, however having such work only in poster session was too ephemeral for our visibility goals. First, to have a permanent resource, we believe that this year we took a big step by having workshop proceedings. Second, this year we also live-streamed the workshop on Facebook , which is also a great resource for anyone who could not attend WiCV. Compared to previous years , we increased the duration of the workshop from half a day to a full day gathering, inviting more senior and junior researchers to present their work. Lastly, another advance is that the frequency of WiCV has been doubled: the fifth WiCV workshop will also be organized this year, collocated with ECCV . We had great submissions on a wide range of computer vision and machine learning topics. Over all submissions, 8% were selected to be presented as oral talks, 21% were selected to be included in the proceedings, and 68% were selected to be presented as posters. We had a diverse program committee of 43 reviewers to evaluate and help improve the papers. Last but not least, we believe that we had a surprising upgrade over past editions, we were able to provide travel grants for authors of all accepted submissions who applied for a travel stipend. This is the first time that WiCV is supporting all presenters and we are greatly thankful to our sponsors. We also had a record sponsorship amount of 126,500 USD, almost twice as much as previous years’ sponsorship amount. Before the main workshop day, we had our mentorship banquet in the evening, sponsored by Facebook. It was also the first time that the committee was physically gathering and we were almost screaming by the excitement to see each other. We had over 100 participants to the dinner, with a queue at the door, including senior researchers, speakers, mentors, and WiCV participants. The first mentorship talk was given by Xin Lu , where she talked about her story including career choices, desire for impact, and advices for the new generations. I particularly enjoyed the discussions on my table, because I was able to ask difficult questions to those I academically admire ( Thomas Funkhousser , Jessica Hodgins , Octavia Camps , Ayellet Tal , and Jana Kosechka ), in this friendly setting. Afterwards Dima Damen shared her experiences and advices in a very sweet mentorship talk. Lastly, Timnit Gebru touched all of our hearts by her story including the realization of being double minority and how she kept coping with the world Friday 47 WiCV Workshop