ECCV 2020 Daily - Wednesday

3 Serge Belongie 1 about the situation we are all currently facing in the scientific community due to the global pandemic. Our big events are all online now as the in-person experience is on hold, possibly for some time. There will be thousands of scientists attending their very first conference this year virtually. Do you have a message for the community on this? I would say embrace this new unknown. This new Zoom university concept. It is scary but embrace it. Keep in mind that every university has multiple weekly seminars. There are so many research groups within universities that regularly schedule talks – big and small – on AI, computer vision, and machine learning. Do not fear contacting faculty at schools or groups that are of interest to you and volunteering to give a talk. All those universities are figuring out what to do. It is a huge opportunity because travel is no longer necessary, so it does not force visitors into unnecessary full-day visits. Present it in such a way like: “I have a talk, I am very flexible, I am in such and such time zone, and do you have any seminar slots coming up where I could present, or a student I could talk to to set it up?” It is possible that after a semester of trying this we may discover a golden opportunity has always been in front of us and we just never took it because we were so used to the meet-and-greets. So, I would say, do not worry about it. Contact faculty and just present that opportunity to them! the best part of the way that they help each other – that junior students get mentored by the seniors. If a student has been working very hard on something and the exact same thing appears on arXiv, they feel down about it, but I tell them that it has just saved them time. They do not have to do that work now. They may not have thought of it that way, but as it turns out, what they were thinking of was possibly incremental. Maybe it was not as big an idea as they thought. Take it as a blessing and try to think of something crazy and weird and different that no one at the big industry labs is pursuing because their manager will not let them. Do something wacky. Usually they cheer up and get back to work. Serge, thank you, this has been a great interview. Finally, as one of the most senior professors that I am interviewing for this ECCV, I would like to talk to you DAILY W e d n e s d a y