Computer Vision News - July 2021

Piotr Dollár 21 Best of CVPR 2021 as well especially at scale. But we don’t have great large-scale supervised datasets. Unsupervised learning has seen amazing progress – for example Kaiming He has been doing amazing work in this field, including at CVPR this year – but it’s still far away from supervised learning, unlike in NLP where unsupervised learning is the default. ” As such an experienced and respected scholar in the community, how did it feel to be first author again on such an important new paper? “ I actually got to code, which was a privilege for me because I don’t often get to do it anymore! ” Piotr laughs. “ This was a paper I coded and did all the experiments primarily myself . I think it’s fun for a more senior person to be able to get more hands-on. ” And as such an eminent member of the community, we asked Piotr if he had any words for first-time CVPR participants who are missing out on the in-person experience this year. “ We’re all in the same boat, ” he responds. “ We’re all figuring this out. Nearly all our conference experiences are in an in person setting, so I think this puts us on a level playing field. We’re all attending these conferences for the first time in a virtual way. ” Piotr works closely with many of the top scholars in the community – Kaiming He , Ross Girshick , Georgia Gkioxari – so we can’t let him go without asking how it feels to work alongside such talent? “ I love that question! ” he smiles. “ It’s incredible and humbling to work with them. A real privilege! Georgia is incredible and there’s some really exciting news for Georgia! [Check on page 29 of this mag] Ross and Kaiming both won the PAMI Young Researcher Award a few years ago . Each of us has slightly different research agendas, but there’s a common thread, which is their research excellence . Nowadays, it’s very easy to just want to publish a flashy result, but they’re all so dedicated to the integrity of their work . I think that’s what has allowed them to be so successful over the long term. ” Finally, Piotr also has some very kind words for us : “ It’s great that you’re featuring our work. I really appreciate it. I have been following Computer Vision News for years and I enjoy it very much! ” To learn more about Piotr’s work, you can view his pre-recorded presentation and PDF poster, and take part in his live Q&A during Paper Session One today (Monday) at 11:00-13:30 EDT.