WorldComp and IPCV Day 2
Day two had a great deal of work concerning feature extraction. Yesterday seemed to be about putting things into images and today was getting things out.
A few things that caught my eye were some segmentation and classification work, hand tracking and identification, face tracking with pose estimation, automatic location of cracks in a highway, location of crosswalks for the blind, circle detection, and detection of pollution.
One thing that is particulrly striking about this conference is its extensive multiculturalarity. I seen attendees and presenters from Spain, Italy, France, UK, Japan, Korea, China, Vietnam, India, and so on. It's quite a melange of language and culture and is a great reminder of how important it is to write culture neutral software. It's also a strong reminder of the inherent biases towards English in pretty much every accepted programming language.
Thinking about this makes me think about the parallels of Latin and English for the publication of scholarly work. English is a fairly terrible language (yet some how millions of children a year manage to become conversant in it), and it must be a tremendous strain for a presenter to have to field questions in it. But it still makes me wonder if 17th century and earlier scholars faced the same challenges in communication.
And lest I forget, the gender diversity is also a welcome change when coming from an industry that is traditionally male dominated.