MIDL Vision 2020

A Word from the General Chair 10 Maxime, it is fantastic to see that 3,500 people have already registered for the conference. What do you think is so special about MIDL? I think being free has really helped. I do not want to criticize any of the other conferences but being free makes it so much more accessible to people. We have had plenty of registrations from Asia, Europe, North America. We thought a lot about the people in Asia. Many people from China were able to register and our technical experts have run tests to ensure that YouTube and Zoom are able to be played and are not blocked for them. I think people are curious to see what is going to happen. I am really looking forward to it! I hear you have a novel review process. Could you tell us a little more about it? Reviewers are aware that their reviews will be open so that makes people more transparent, more polite, more constructive… and destructive but in a polite way! I have always been a defender of this concept. A lot of value goes into these reviews. They help the authors but also instruct the community. People say, “What would I have done in this situation?” You can see what the reviewers think and apply it to your own work. I think this improves the quality. I come from the MR world and OHBM world – human brain mapping – and ISMRM. In this world, all our conferences are short papers. Abstracts. Less details on the algorithms and the methods. Just a small introduction and results. It is an excuse to present your work and get a discussion going. These short papers are really popular. It is an interesting format that MIDL offers but no other conferences – at least in the computer vision or medical image computing world – do. I am a really big fan of this. I think it improves the quality of the event. the student level. That’s a part of it. We can recruit some of the best people from everywhere. Maxime Descoteaux At a recent CVPR, Laura Leal-Taixé and Torsten Sattler organized a tutorial on how to write a good review , and it was very successful. I am happy to hear that. Some supervisors teach it to their students, but a lot of this we do not learn actually. As an author, if you have had some mean reviewers in the past, you tend to become mean yourself! You expect so Let’s go crazy and let’s make this free!