ECCV 2020 Daily - Wednesday

2 Guest 8 Serge Belongie is a Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University and an Associate Dean at Cornell Tech. He started full-time at Cornell in January 2014 and has been Associate Dean since July last year. He speaks to us about his professional career to date. Serge, we have wanted to interview you for some time, and having recently interviewed your students – Zekun Hao at CVPR in June and Menglin Jia just yesterday at ECCV – we have finally been triggered to ask! Can you tell our readers about your work? My main project for the past decade or so has been on a topic called fine-grained visual categorization. This is a long- term collaboration with Professor Pietro Perona at Caltech called Visipedia. We have been very involved with the CVPR community through a series of workshopscalledFGVC. Theseworkshops and Visipedia itself focus on recognition of tightly related natural or man-made objects within categories such as birds or butterflies, or in the case of Menglin’s work, clothing/apparel. Is your interest in this work because of how it is applied in the real world, or is there something intrinsic in the science that attracts you? It is a combination of the two. A lot of the work that was going on in object DAILY W e d n e s d a y