ECCV 2018 Daily - Thursday

It has been a long time since ICCV has taken place in Asia. It’s the perfect time and a great opportunity for Western and Asian people to come together in Seoul. Computer vision and machine learning are hot issues in Korea, China, and Japan. There are so many start-ups and the governments are very interested in investing in industry and educational research. Seoul is well-known for being a dynamic, high-tech city. It’s also an attractive city with an interesting, unique culture, including K-pop and K- drama. It is a combination of old and modern city. I think the attendees will have a great time and will enjoy a lot of activities there. They will find plenty of restaurants and interesting places to visit. If I remember correctly, Korean was the third nationality in number at ICCV 2017 in Venice? Yes, that’s true. Also, at CVPR this year, I believe Korean was the third nationality. Therefore, not everybody is going to the other side of the world. Actually, many, many hundreds of them will already be there! Yes, computer vision is very popular in Korea. Not only in academia but also in industry. I think it’s a great opportunity for the Korean computer vision community as well. As you said, our community is growing rapidly, and the number of attendees at conferences like CVPR, ECCV, and certainly at ICCV next year, is increasing. Have you found a venue which will be able to accommodate everyone? That is a very important issue in preparing and planning a major conference like this. Fortunately, in our case, the venue will be the COEX. It is the biggest convention center in the Seoul business district and can accommodate up to 6,000 people! We are expecting the number of attendees might be up to 5,000, maybe more, so we will have no problem with space. Would you like to tell us about the stellar team who are organising the event together with you? Yes, we are a very strong team in many respects. We have four general chairs: myself, David Forsyth, Marc Pollefeys and Xiaoou Tang. We are all experienced people and have worked on many conferences as committee members, general chairs and program chairs; as well as for journals including PAMI, IJCV and CVIU. We are all strong enough to make the conference a success! We have four program chairs: Nikos Paragios ; Svetlana Lazebnik; Ming-Hsuan Yang, from UC Merced; and In So Kweon, from KAIST. Those four are very keen to put together an excellent program. Some of them are junior and some are very senior. Daily Thursday 13 Kyoung Mu Lee 19 “… the stellar team…” “… accommodate up to 6,000 people!” “We are all strong enough to make the conference a success!”