The ECCV2020 Experience

I attended ECCV2020 – the top European Computer Vision Conference (24 –28 August 2020). This blog post describes my experience. :)

About ECCV 2020

Source: https://eccv2020.eu/

The European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) is a top tier biennial Image Analysis conference of Europe. The conference provides a platform for academic as well as industrial AI researchers around the world to share their work.

This year, the conference was 100% virtual thanks to the pandemic. 😭

Disclaimer

• This was my very first time attending an AI conference.
• I attended this conference as a delegate and not a presenter/organizer.

I would like to share my virtual journey through various phases of the conference.

Before the conference

ECCV released the recorded content for oral, poster, workshops and tutorials 2–3 days before the conference start date. I used this time to get myself familiar with the ECCV portal which was pretty intuitive to use and had a great user experience.

Quick Glimpse of the ECCV2020 portal. Source: https://eccv.6connex.eu/

The oral, poster presentations had short (1–2 min) and long (~10 min) videos explaining the approach. Furthermore, the papers and posters were segregated by topics and authors for ease of accessibility. I selected the topics that interested me (Vision and Language, Self Supervised Learning) and started going through the playlist of each of the topics. This way I knew the papers that I find the most interesting and had thought about some questions I could discuss with the authors.

During the Conference

The conference program had 2 days for workshops + tutorials and 4 days for posters and oral presentations.

Main Conference Proceedings

The main conference had oral and spotlight presentations with live Q&A with authors. Poster presentations had zoom sessions for one on one interactions with authors. Each of the poster and oral papers had a short and long video describing their method.

I did not find the spotlight and oral live presentations very helpful to get a gist of the approach as only the short videos were played followed by Q&A.

The zoom sessions were interesting as I got to interact, ask questions and spark up discussions with various researchers. In some of the sessions, the professors were also present along with the students to support them which was very encouraging to witness :)

Workshops and Tutorials

Workshops and Tutorials had different formats and discussion types-

• Live/Recorded talks followed with Q&As.
• Prerecorded talks (expected to be watched before the workshop) with only live discussions and Q&As during the slots. These were my least favorite as it became hard to establish context or follow at times.
• Panel Discussions. These were really fun to watch given you had some basic knowledge about the topic at hand. The panel discussions had top researchers from the niche fields discussing open questions, challenges, and their thoughts on the topic of the workshop.
• Orals/Poster presentations for some workshops were interestingly hosted on Gather Town. This was the closest feel to a physical conference where you can navigate your avatar through the room and check out different posters and interact with them. Although I did see some authors facing difficulties to share screens and present their work.

Listing the workshops I attended and enjoyed!

• Self Supervised Learning: What is Next? — Very well curated talks, amazing speakers, and insights on the future direction.
• Women In Computer Vision — Panel Discussion on Inclusive AI was very interesting and Mentoring Dinner was very helpful.
• Weakly Supervised Learning in Computer Vision — Informative and provides a good glimpse of the timeline of developments in this area.
• Embodied Vision, Action and Language — Enjoyed the Panel discussion and Chelsea Finn’s Talk on “Learning Structured Exploration Strategies via Language and Simple Supervision”.

Afterthoughts

Finally, my review of the conference in “The good the bad and the ugly” style.

The Good

• The pre-recorded videos organized in a topic-wise “Taster Playlist” for orals and posters were very helpful. Gave the advantage of quickly skimming through various papers and get to the relevant ones.
• The conference content will be accessible until May 2021. 🥳 (Source)
• The poster presentation Zoom slots were very less crowded. This gave me a lot of one on one time to interact with the researchers. (Although, the presenters may have a different story to tell).
• I enjoyed interacting and getting guidance from top researchers in the field and I admire their welcoming and humble attitude.

The Bad

• At times I was stricken by a bad FOMO as good presentations were happening simultaneously and I wanted to attend both. In the virtual conference setting it is difficult to find out where the buzz is going on. To some extent, twitter helped and I strongly urge all presenters to post a summary and reminder about their presentations on social media platforms.
• My mind went berserk at times trying to figure out the local timezone time conversion of presentations. Luckily the calendar invites were timezone calibrated and some workshop websites were thoughtful enough to display times according to viewers’ timezone.
• The conference was expensive not just to attend but also to publish causing some outrage.

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• Furthermore, even the cost of organizing the virtual conference was too high.

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The Ugly

• The live spotlight and oral sessions were too heavy on advertisements. This ruined the vibe and many delegates voiced strong disapproval of this.

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The way forward for AI Conferences

After the success and proven track record of hosting conferences virtually, the organizers will definitely eye this possibility for the future conferences. However, it does not completely replace the experience of attending an in-person conference. So until we have our VR worlds ready, I guess hybrid conferences would probably be the way to go. <Enter Dystopian Music>

Source: Ready Player One

In conclusion, it was very inspirational and motivating to see the good work done by so many amazing researchers. I hope the AI community collaborates to make all conferences more accessible, inclusive, and user friendly. I also look forward to attending an in-person conference soon. :)

References

• ECCV 2020 Official Website
• ECCV Wiki
• ECCV Twitter