CVPR Daily - 2018 - Thursday

Thursday 7 successful in these industry applications. You will have met many young scientists this week who are attending their first CVPR conference. What strikes you positively about them compared to when you were a student? It’s a big contrast. Having been in this field for a long time and having worked on image, video, multimedia, computer vision for multiple decades, what has really happened is the people here doing the work – the students, the researchers, the postdocs, the faculty – they’re empowered now in a way that hasn’t ever happened before. Certainly not in a long time. There’s an excitement in their field. From an application point of view, there are so many different outlets for the work that they do. The number of opportunities they have is tremendous – unprecedented in a way – and there is so much support for the work they are doing. I feel really good for all of them and think they should take full advantage of this opportunity. They are in the driver’s seat. What about the wide range of nationalities represented here today, compared to a few decades ago? Yes, certainly the community is doing better in diversity, but it is a work in progress. There are many ways in which we need to improve our diversity. It’s good to see positive steps here. For example, there’s the Women in Computer Vision workshop happening on Friday. I attended that one last year and it was really great to see. We need to address some of these diversity challenges at all levels. Certainly, we’d like to see an even better result sometime in the future. John R. Smith - IBM