This was my first time attending one of the largest computer vision conferences, Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR). The 2019 CVPR conference took place in Long Beach, California. The first day, after a brief stop at my hotel, I headed to the Long Beach Convention center to pick my badge and surprisingly I saw a long queue at the registration desk. Well, I realized that I’m going to witness the top computer vision researchers community in the world. The program guide revealed a clear picture of what to expect for the upcoming days. I saw the details of a lot of tutorials, demos, exhibitions, oral and poster presentations, social events, and workshops to occupy every participant.
The workshops were arranged on the first two days and I was excited to present my paper on Monday morning at the Bias Estimation in Face Analytics (BEFA) workshop. My advisor who is very well-known in the biometric research community was also there with me and he motivated me to give my best shot at the presentation. We saw the workshop room was getting occupied in seconds and the workshop started with a welcome speech and an invited talk by Alice O’toole. I felt immense privilege when she mentioned our names and research work in her talk. I got the first chance to present and I was able to utilize the exact allocated time of ten minutes to touch the major details and takeaways of my research.
I saw the curiosity among the audience during my presentation and happy to see people interested in our idea and impressed by our results. After the presentation, I was able to answer some interesting questions from the audience. I was eagerly waiting for the second invited talk by Patrick J. Grother from NIST who does prominent works in biometrics and face recognition and also the author of FRVT reports. I got a chance to personally meet him later and it was very interesting to listen to the thoughtful conversations between him and my advisor during our lunch together.
After all the presentations and invited talks, the last session was a panel discussion and I have no doubt that it was the most-interesting session of the day. I got to see some insightful conversions going back and forth between the participants and panelists were eager to listen and answer them. Overall the experience was great and I tried to reach out to people as much as possible. The next three days, I made a plan to attend some interesting oral and poster presentations specifically based on GANs since we were planning on some extended studies on GANs. The poster exhibition was huge, and crowded and I almost reached out to all of them and spent more time on the posters I found interesting.
It was super informative and a huge learning experience attending CVPR 2019 and I got a chance to meet some inspiring new people and learn what they are working on. Overall I got a better scope of many fields including mine and the explorations left and possible with a focused research. I reserved the last few hours on the last day to explore the city and some of its main attractions. I didn’t forget to take a nice walk around the city that has a stunning mountain view in the background.
