Sunday, July 11, 2004

What do we know?

About a week ago, I was at this year's CVPR (IEEE Intl' conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition) that was held in Washington. It is one of the premier conferences in the field and expectedly, there were many good papers in the main conference and in the more-focused workshops. Some of the workshops like the one on GOR(Generic Object Recognition) had some professors sounding a cautious note (case in point: Professor Michael Tarr's talk entitled - "Do we know more than we did 20 years ago?" His answer - "Not really!"). But there were others that were more upbeat. For instance, people were a little more hopeful in the Event Recognition workshop - which is good news for me, since I'm working in that area.

My only peeve about the conference? You see, due to a ban on skyscrapers, many of the buildings in DC - including the conference venue - the Grand Hyatt, has several underground floors. Everyday, descending three levels below the ground to reach the conference venue was like going into a bunker of some kind. Of course, given that we were in the midst of some very smart people from around the world, it might be a good idea!

More technology-related stuff: They are saying BPL could be the new mantra. No, that's not the company that makes TV's in India (or used to, at some point in time). BPL stands for Broadband over Power Lines. I remember during my senior year at REC Surathkal, one of my classmates was working on "Internet over power lines" as his final year project and it was exciting stuff!

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