Computer Vision News - October 2018

Another important event of WiCV is the mentoring dinner where in a casual environment the young female researchers can find out about the career paths in the world of research from their role models. There, WiCV also becomes a venue where senior researchers share their stories and experience with junior researchers. The workshop started with an overview of WiCV‘s statistics at ECCV. The workshop received 50 high quality submissions , 41 of which have been accepted. A travel grant has been offered to all the 38 accepted papers who applied for it. Moreover, since the previous edition of WiCV the workshop offers the authors the possibility to be published in the proceedings, 16 authors decided for this option and will be published in this edition of WiCV. The fifth WiCV workshop offered three tracks, consisting of three interesting keynotes from Tamara Berg , Svetlana Lazebnik and Kate Saenko , two oral sessions featuring mainly high quality publications of this year's CVPR or ECCV main conference papers and a poster session providing a platform for young researchers to show their work to a broader audience. The workshop concluded with a one hour panel discussion on diversity. The panel was made up of the three female keynote speakers as well as two male researchers, Andrew Fitzgibbon and Jitendra Malik . A diverse range of subjects was addressed during the panel discussion with anonymous questions from the audience. Questions ranged from suggestions for specific situations, such as how one can encourage their male coworkers in providing a safe working environment, to personal questions addressed to the panel about their biggest research mistakes in life. An important point arose following CVPR's publication of a code of conduct , as well as naming a conference ombud for reports about violations. The recommendation for ECCV to follow this example has been forwarded to ECCV2020 organizers . Overall this first edition of the WiCV workshop at ECCV attracted unprecedented attendance. The attendees were a mixed of male and female audience . This shows that diversity has already come a long way in the community. However, the points raised during the panel discussion reveal that women in a male dominated field still face problems based on unconscious biases, openly expressed prejudices and even Daily WiCV Workshop 21 “… three interesting keynotes from Tamara Berg, Svetlana Lazebnik and Kate Saenko!” WiCV organizers at ECCV2018 (left to right): Dena Bazazian, Yana Hasson, Gul Varol, Hilde Kuehne, Angjoo Kanazawa, Zeynep Akata