Computer Vision News - June 2018

40 they also have the possibility to have a booth, so they can showcase their technology and hopefully attract people to them. In any case Terry Peters is the person to contact if you are a prospective sponsor. The other thing to say is that we try to work with each of the companies to tailor. We have certain categories but at the same time we work with them to tailor the products, for some of the main companies like NVIDIA we have been working to develop the ideas of several challenges by them or their tutorials. So please do talk to Terry and we’ll try to accommodate in the interests of the industry. What is the key factor for success for the next edition of MICCAI? What will make it special? There is more than one thing, but the one thing that I can tell you now is that we got 33% more submissions this year than any year before. Just to give an idea, last year we got roughly 1000 expressions of interest and 800 final submissions. That was already high compared to previous years. This year we got about 1400 intentions to submit, so that’s about 40% more; and about 1060 final submissions, so that is about 30% more than the previous year. So there is a huge interest in the community and I think that gives us a lot of hope as well. At the beginning we were not clear whether this was an increase in the number of papers but not necessarily maintaining the quality – that could have been the case – but I can tell you now that that is not the case. During May we notified the outcome of the papers. Something that has happened this year is that we got a similar amount of direct accepts as the previous year, a similar percentage, which is about 14%. These are papers that did very good in the reviews and will get straightforward access. We got lower than before direct rejects. In the past we used to have 30-40% direct rejects. This year we got about 26% direct rejects, which means that there is a huge amount of borderline papers, nearing about 60% of the papers. We need to take approximately one third of them. So the society is looking at the moment whether this year, given the increase in papers, we want to maintain the acceptance rate. That means that instead of 260 papers we will easily have in the area of 320-350 papers, which also opens the question of what do we do with the orals and what do we do with all the overflow. A few weeks ago we had approval from the board to actually have for the first time parallel oral sessions, but we will do it experimentally this year on only one of the three days – which will be the Tuesday, the middle day. If the community likes that idea then possibly in the future we can look into doing that throughout the whole conference, which is going to be crucial if we want to grow the conference to the size of a CVPR or NIPS, because otherwise we can’t scale it up. So this year we are fortunate enough that we have two amphitheaters in the conference venue and that those are available for us. So the idea will be that we will be able to split the orals of the Wednesday and that will be a day where we’re going to put primarily the clinical ready papers. So we are going to possibly divide them by clinical application. 100 Days to MICCAI 2018 Computer Vision News “We got 33% more submissions this year than any year before!” Events