MIDL Vision 2020

Maxime Descoteaux 11 much from others, but you forget that this is somebody’s work and maybe one year of their life spent on it. Now that I am a bit more experienced and senior, I keep that in mind whenever I do a review or help a student to do one. It is important because there are human beings behind the work. Have you faced any challenges organizing the conference this year? It has mostly been stressful for our technical people that have to deal with registration and all the emails. Also, we’ve been creating poster sessions manually and Zoom links. It hasn’t been easy because we are amongst the first to do it. I would love to be able to just populate a spreadsheet, run a script, and have everything created in Zoom or in Jitsi, but that is not possible yet. A lot of what we had to do was with manual interventions and that was a challenge. Do you have a message for participants about how to take the best out of this program? To get the best out of the program you have to actively work the chat. There is a specific channel for every paper and the authors will be in there. It is almost like being in person in front of a poster. You can have some intimate discussions in these channels. A little bit like we all do now in our own labs with Slack channels and Hangouts. If authors and participants get involved in that, that’s how they’re going to get the most out of it. I encourage people to have some meetings outside too. Create a separate Skype or Hangout and just mingle together. Unfortunately, we haven’t found the mechanism to go out for a beer or a meal yet. That’s hard to replace in a virtual conference, but we have to find some new innovative way to do it! How will people be able to keep in touch with the community after MIDL? We’re not closing these platforms. Of course, we will close the Zoom rooms, but the chat and all the channels will continue to be live, and this can go on for years. The papers are public, the reviews are public, and now the channels will be online and public. I hope people stay active. None of this would be possible without the sponsors. Our platinum sponsors especially. Thanks toMicrosoft and CIFAR because this was risky for them and I’m happy they did it. Suddenly we didn’t have to pay for a conference centre and meals and coffee breaks. As soon as we saw the budget and the sponsors were still in and supporting us, we said, “Let’s go crazy and let’s make this free!” We are very proud of it. In the August issue of Computer Vision News, we will have a special MIDL section with new articles from the conference to help the community keep in touch. That’s amazing. Thank you for doing that!