ECCV 2020 Daily - Thursday

3 Bob Fisher 1 Not all my work has been about the research. I have put a lot of effort into CVonlineandnowintocollectingdatasets, which I hope has been valuable to the community. Some great researchers have been collecting and publishing datasets – I have created a few myself – and you can see how being able to compare performance has really driven improvement in the quality of computer vision research. It is not all because of deep learning, although that has been a huge factor as well. It is exciting to play a little part in the gathering and the promotion of these datasets to the community. Do you find it easier now to connect teams and promote projects than it was when you were a young researcher? There are certainly more opportunities for that now. The funding agencies recognized that there was too much silo-based research that did not make it much out of universities. There are more people in the field and get to know them a little bit. For senior people, there is a lot of engaging, talking about potential projects and proposals, and teamwork activity. The online platform works well technically and we have tried to replicate the feeling of a live conference and how dynamic the field is, but it is not exactly the same as being in a room with a few thousand people and getting excited about the papers being presented. Over the course of your career, you have done a lot of research. Can you tell us more about some of that? Lately, I tend to work more on practical applications of computer vision and a little bit of robotics technology. My most recent project was TrimBot2020 where webuilt the first outdoor gardening robot that could trim bushes and prune roses. Before that, I had the Fish4Knowledge project, wherewe acquired a database of over a billion coral reef fish. Part of what we were trying to do was environmental monitoring, and part was working out what you can do with really large image databases, like recognizing the species of the fish. These have been European Commission- funded projects and something else that I have worked on lately is building consortia. It has been exciting to help build teams, connect people, and leverage the individual skills of all the team members to do something that is bigger and better. DAILY T h u r s d a y 2 textured 3D scans froma scanning project investigating body shape monitoring during diets