Computer Vision News - December 2019

Exclusive Interview 20 Marc, thank you for agreeing to talk to us. I have wanted to have a chat with you for a long time! We have many interesting topics to cover, including your work at Microsoft, HoloLens and ETH Zurich. Last but not least, you are one of the General Chairs here at ICCV 2019. Where shall we start? Let’s start here. I’m one of the General Chairs but, of course, the person that really made this happen is Kyoung Mu Lee who is the local General Chair. I know because when I was the local chair in Zurich for ECCV 2014 that’s where I did most of the work. Here, clearly Kyoung Mu has done an amazing job. This is a fantastic facility and I have heard only good things from people who have really enjoyed the conference, including myself! He has been able to scale by a very big order of magnitude. Yes, when we bid for this four years ago, we were expecting maybe 3,000 or 4,000 people. That’s what we planned for. He was able to keep scaling this to 7,500. With no visible glitches. Exactly. Between Kyoung Mu and the local team, they’ve been able to smoothly scale things and it has worked really nicely. I like the format. I think the awards session at the beginning was very nice. I liked the longer talks in that session. It is sad that we can’t do that for all the orals anymore. There are advantages and disadvantages to having our community grow this fast. How will this evolve in the future? Will it slow down? We don’t know. It’s a very interesting time in the computer vision community right now. With 4,000 papers submitted, it’s certainly a huge task. It scales with the size of the community, but it does bring some challenges. This was our program chairs’ responsibility and I think they did a fantastic job. It’s impossible to ask you about ICCV 2019 without mentioning the fact that 3,000 participants are Koreans. Do you have any reflections about what the local community has been able to do and how they have grown they have Best of ICCV 2019 Marc Pollefeys