Computer Vision News - October 2018

Daily Wednesday Alyosha, how many ECCVs have you been to already? Many! ECCV is one of my favourite vision conferences, because it’s always in Europe, which I like, and it’s usually smaller. It used to be! [ both laugh ] It used to be the smallest one, so it was a great place to meet people and to chat and to talk about the work at the posters without being overcrowded. Unfortunately, it’s also getting bigger, but it’s still kind of manageable. Even after many years working in the field and attending numerous conferences, are you still just as interested in networking and listening to what people have to say? I would differentiate between networking and talking about research. The young people say, “ You need to be networking ”, I’m not sure what that even means. I’m not very good at networking, but I like to talk about science, and I like to talk about things that interest me. What do you think young people who come here for the first or second time should spend their time doing? My first conference was ICCV in 1999 in Corfu. It was amazing. A magical place. I had read all of these papers by all of these people who I was so impressed with. Then suddenly, here they were, right in front of me! You can ask them questions about their work and you can see what they are doing now. I remember I was at the SIFT poster by David Lowe. It was a single author poster in the corner of the poster area. I was the only person there and it was fantastic! That’s another thing. Don’t judge too much about orals versus posters, because the distinction is often arbitrary. As a young person going through 100 posters, how do you decide whether to stop or not to stop, to ask or not to ask? How do you recognise which work is worth discussing? When I was young, I did a lot of homework. Every evening before the next day, I would go through and look at all of the paper titles. I would actually even look at the papers and the pictures ahead of time, so I could already figure out the few things that I was interested in. I would list them all in a little notebook and then I would go and see those posters. Alyosha Efros 12 “Then suddenly, here they were, right in front of me!”