Computer Vision News - December 2019

Marc Pollefeys 25 for enterprises. The remote assistance capability can be integrated directly in your company communication platform so that people out in the field or in the factory can contact the experts to help them resolve a problem. Marc, this has been a really fascinating interview. I knew that we would run out of time to talk in detail about ETH Zurich. It’s such an important institutionthat itdeservesan interview all of its own. Briefly though, what can you tell us about your work there? ETH is indeed a fantastic place. Outside of the Anglo-Saxon world, it’s systematically the best university, and in computer science is doing fantastically well. We have an amazing department. In the Shanghai Ranking for computer science we are No.5 after CMU, Stanford, MIT and Berkeley. In the Times Higher Education rankings, we are currently No.2 in the world. In large part, this is down to the sizeable resources that we get for every professor to invest, and we have a lot of freedom in research. That freedom means you can get on and start new things on your own initiative; exploring new areas without first having to prove yourself. Also, it’s easy to attract top people at all levels as ETH is such a great place and Zurich is such a great city with a great quality of life. We have excellent students, but we also bring in excellent PhD students, Master’s students, postdocs, and of course faculty. Combined with healthy resources, it is an amazing mix. When I joinedMicrosoft, I told Alex that I would only accept if he understood that after two years I would go back to Zurich. The only thing that changed is that I decided to stay 50/50 between ETH and Microsoft. I saw that I could do something that would be a win for ETH and a win for Microsoft. On the one hand, there’s no better place than ETH to be able to explore these longer- term challenging topics and more open research problems. On the other hand, a company like Microsoft has resources, has a lot of very interesting problems, has interesting devices and capabilities, and bringing those two together is a win-win. The students get super interesting problems to work on that are inspired by the challenges that we see to realise the vision of HoloLens and mixed reality. Having a Microsoft lab that’s closely associated with ETH, where we have ETH PhD students working with us, puts me in a unique position and brings a lot of additional value to both of my roles. "In the Times Higher Education rankings, we are currently No.2 in the world." Best of ICCV 2019