CVPR Daily - Tuesday

Are you aware of other people in other places doing similar research? I think so. I think it’s rediscovering new trends. At the very beginning, it started with computer vision as a part of robotics, Later, it started to separate because computer vision has become a whole research part in itself. We have this whole conference! These two can actually go together. So, there are a lot of researchers also working on similar areas of thinking about how to better combine computer vision and robotics. What brought you to the United States? I came here for my PhD. Why did you choose Princeton? I thought it was a nice program, and I talked to my prospective advisor back then. They were working on a lot of interesting 3D perception problems. Even at that time, it was very new. Before I started my PhD, I always thought computer vision was just about analyzing 2D pixels, but my advisor at that time was one of the very few that got into 3D perception. That’s what made me feel very excited. Can you tell me one specific teacher at Princeton that particularly impressed you? I actually didn’t take a lot of courses at Princeton. I mostly interact with my advisor Thomas Funkhouser. He is actually a graphics professor. It’s not directly computer vision. At the very beginning, I studied computer vision with robotics. But, I think throughout my PhD, I changed my research direction. The whole group kind of moved more towards computer vision and now even robotics. What is the thing that you miss the most about China? Food, of course! But there's a lot of Chinese food in America. Especially in New York, for example, Colombia. So that's also one reason I chose Colombia. So there is a Chinatown in Columbia. Yes. What was the main breakthrough that you have assisted to in the fields of the fields of robotics and computer vision, in your very young academic life or in your younger life as a researcher? What struck you? 25 DAILY CVPR Tuesday Shuran Song