Dena Bazazian, organiser of the Women in Computer Vision CVPR 2018 Workshop

CVC PhD student Dena Bazazian is one of the organisers of the WiCV Workshop at 2018’s CVPR Conference, which will take place at Salt Lake City this summer with over 4000 expected attendees in one of the biggest Computer Vision gatherings in the world.

Putting the focus of Women in Tech is the main aim of the WiCV Workshop in order to foster and promote women’s work within the Tech industry. This year’s meeting is organised by the aforementioned Dena Bazazian (CVC), Dr. Adriana Romero (Facebook), Dr. Ilke Demir (Facebook), Dr. Viktoriia Sharmanska (Imperial College London), and Lyne P. Tchapmi (Stanford). According to the organisers, the goal of the Workshop are to “raise visibility of female computer vision researchers by presenting invited research talks by women who are role models in this field.” To “give opportunities to junior female students or researchers to present their work via a poster session and travel awards” and, finally, to “share experience and career advice for female students and professionals”. “I believe an event such as WiCV will act as a strong motivator for all the women in computer vision, especially young researchers who are taking their first steps in a field mostly populated by men. Therefore, I greatly believe in what WiCV stands for and the benefits it brings at every edition: raising every year the self-reliance of women working in computer vision and helping to include each other in a broader community is an aspect of primary importance and can be achieved only by sharing career advices and encouraging each other as female researchers. A workshop like WiCV is the perfect venue to spread this kind of attitude, rising at the same time awareness in the whole scientific community,” Dena explains. Dena Bazazian is a PhD student at CVC since 2016 under the supervision of Dr. Dimosthenis Karatzas (Computer Vision Center) and Dr. Andrew Bagdanov (Florence University). She is working on text localization and recognition in unconstrained conditions. Her research focuses on the combination of visual and textual data to mutually improve text extraction and scene understanding. The call for papers is currently open until the 23^rd of March. Dena and her colleagues expect a high attendance and paper rate and hope these type of actions help close the gap in female representation within Computer Vision and Tech in general.