Computer Vision News - December 2019

Georgia Gkioxari 29 would Kaiming react? How would Kaiming present it? Howwould Kaiming feel afterwards?” So I’m actually more inspired rather than feeling pressure. Also, you have a very strong leadership at Facebook AI that must bring the best out of you. Correct - The leaders at Facebook AI, not only the leaders, but a lot of the senior members are people in the academic community who are very popular: Jitendra Malik , Kristen Grauman, Abhinav Gupta, Yann LeCun , Rob Fergus, Leon Bottou. All of these people are hugely famous and hugely influential. Interacting with them is another level of inspiration and pressure. To actually have your work read by someone like Yann, it has to be solid. Wow! Can you tell us a story about what it’s like to work with such a special bunch of people? Before publishing Mask R-CNN, that paper was ready well in advance. Actually, it was named Best Paper of 2017 by our magazine. Awesome, thank you! When we were publishing that paper, it was done like a month and a half in advance. I was working on another paper, another submission for that conference, and I remember my colleagues. I was on grad student mode. Before the deadline, I have to work very hard. I have to keep pushing, pushing, pushing. Mask R-CNN was so ready that we had to talk about how to align the figures, like how to make the papers perfectly aligned with the image and the text so that it’s pleasing visually. I was like, “Oh my god! This level of detail for me is like a week before the deadline! I don’t sleep! I work super hard to get the paper ready!” They were talking until like 2 AM on how to align figures! [both laugh] How do brilliant ideas like this grow in peoples’ minds? I don’t think there is a recipe. When people get together in a room, good ideas come out of it. It’s something that I’ve seen, not just back then, but throughout all these years. Better ideas come when people collaborate more, rather than with single author projects. So trust is a major component in success, trust in your team. Yes - For me, that’s a given. If anyone who is reading this is in a team, and there’s no trust, they should take action. That can be either to try to address those problems or get out. If there is no trust, there are no good ideas. Nothing will come out of it. Best of ICCV 2019