CVPR Daily - Thursday

DAILY T h u r s d a y David Fouhey 11 The topic can totally change from one meeting to the next. From talking about the next iteration of a course, to speaking about someone’s results. I switch around lot, which is exciting, because I see lots of new fun stuff. Do you find that you learn things from your students? What’s great is that students often have new and fresh ideas. What’s wonderful about computer vision is that we really, as a field, don’t know what’s going on most of the time. It’s very easy for someone to get started and to think of something totally new that you’ve never thought of before in that way. That’s why it’s wonderful to work with a collection of students from all sorts of different backgrounds. It keeps you on your toes and you get to learn all these new perspectives on things. It’s great. And they also help you keep up with reading arXiv! Do you ever feel overwhelmed by it all? Do you have moments where you think, “Get me out of here!” and want to be a software engineer in a start-up instead? I mean, definitely, in academia like in grad school you often do have these moments where nothing works and where your paper gets rejected, then your paper gets rejected again, and it’s really hard at times. Especially when you first start out. You go into this field where the default response is often no. I think it’s very important as a field that, especially as we’re growing, we treat people with respect and actively try to be inclusive of new people. It’s hard enough for my students when their papers get rejected, but at least they have someone who can say, “I’ll fix this,” but when people are just getting started and don’t have mentors floating around in their life, it can be tough. This is a problem that exists when a field grows really quickly, but in the long run the growth is really exciting.