Event

Last Friday 31^st of May, CVC celebrated its Open Day in a two turn visit. Students from the Autonomous University of Barcelona and professionals from several local companies visited our institution in order to know, first hand, the research that is being developed in the area of Computer Vision, as well as the different job and training opportunities offered. Moreover, they were able to explore our facilities and test some of our latest demonstrations.  

CVC has participated at this year’s CROMA 2.0 day, the initiative launched by the Autonomous Solidary Foundation (FAS) that promotes the link between the Autonomous University of Barcelona and schools with a large presence of students at risk of social exclusion.

In this way, almost 40 primary school students between 10 and 12 years old from four different schools of Vallès Occidental visited CVC on the 28^th of May in the morning. These four schools – Mossèn Cinto Verdaguer School (Rubí), Ramon Llull School (Rubí) Juan Ramón Jiménez School (Sabadell) and Miquel Carreras School (Sabadell) – have been working during the months of April and May on the project “how can we design a pain detector for patients that can’t communicate?”, based on Pau Rodriguez’s research on pain detection. So, finally, after a few weeks of effort and learning, the kids were able to present the results of this project to CVC researchers. These results turned out to be more creative and innovative than anticipated, with lots of brilliant ideas such as a super helmet to detect pain or a machine that detects immediately the pain expression in people’s faces.

After presentations, some CVC researchers organized four different workshops to let children know what is exactly Computer Vision and which are its applications beyond pain detection.

In the first activity, coordinated by Dr. Ernest Valveny, the kids could learn how computers can understand text and pictures. They could also experiment with our sketch-based retrieval tool, drawing lots of sketches and discovering the pictures that most resembled them. The second workshop, coordinated by Dr. Jordi Gonzàlez and Diego Velazquez, was thought to continue working on the concept of biometrics but this time, with a different purpose: detecting people’s age and gender. Children could discover a demonstration that uses Computer Vision to predict their age and gender and they also could test it with photos of their favourite celebrities. Moving on the next activity,  CVC NeuroBiT group showed children the colour lab and explained to them two different experiments to detect color blindness: the Ishihara test and the Farnsworth test. In the last activity, the kids could discover what a car will look like in the future meanwhile they raced against the Artificial Intelligence through our CARLA Simulator. They were really amazed when they realized that video games are not only used for entertainment, they are also used as important tools for research and progress.

CVC was present at this year’s MEMEnginy that took place at the hall of UAB’s Engineering School.

We presented our training opportunities both for undergraduate as graduate students, as well as the Master in Computer Vision, coordinated by Dr. Maria Vanrell, UAB professor and CVC Researcher.

In addition, all the attendees who came to the CVC booth, were able to test different demonstration such as the apparent personality detector, the video game of racing against the Artificial Intelligence through the CARLA Simulator or the videogames used to validate the transcription of the old handwritten documents.

We had a good representation of CVC people at this year’s NeurIPS which took place on the first week of December in Montreal. The articles presented were the following:

‘Memory Replay GANs: learning to generate images from new categories without forgetting‘, by authors Chenshen Wu, Luis Herranz, Xialei Liu, Yaxing Wang, Dr. Joost van de Weijer and Dr. Bogdan Raducanu (all from CVC);

‘Image-to-image translation for cross-domain disentanglement‘, by authors Dr. Abel González, Dr. Joost van de Weijer and Dr. Yoshua Bengio;

‘TADAM: Task dependent adaptive metric for improved few-shot learning‘, by authors Boris N. Oreshkin, Pau Rodriguez (CVC member) and Dr. Alexandre Lacoste

At the Metalearning Workshop:

Cross-Modulation Networks for Few-Shot Learning, by authors Hugo Prol (CVC master student), Vicent Dumoulin and Luis Herranz.

Dr. Antonio Lopez took part of the First Forum on Autonomous Vehicles, organized by the Association of Industrial Engineers of Catalonia, that was held the 27^th of November at Barcelona.

The event was celebrated in order to reflect on the changes that may arise from the implementation of the autonomous vehicle. In this first edition, called “between myth and reality”, it was discussed the issue of the autonomous car not only from the technological current but also from other areas such as Law, Sociology or Philosophy.

Dr. Antonio López was an invited speaker of the technological part, in which he talked about Artificial Intelligence for Autonomous Driving and presented his current research and recent projects such as Carla or Synthia.

CVC was present at this year’s Smart City Expo presenting its technology in Computer Vision to a high number of enterprises and companies who visited us in our stand. The Smart City Expo is a great opportunity to meet game changes all over the world, who gather in Barcelona for one week in order to exchange ideas and business opportunities. A day after the Expo, we had a visit of more than 50 delegates from over 10 countries invited by ACCIO in order to know our Research Center and explore possible sinergies and collaborations.

On the 7th of November we had the official kick off to the ExperimentAI project, an initiative promoted and coordinated by the Computer Vision Center and funded by the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT) that brings Artificial Intelligence and Computer Vision closer to society.

The session started with an inaugural address by Joana Barbany, General Director of Digital Society at the Government of Catalonia and councillor of Sant Cugat del Vallès. It continued with an introduction of the project and the aims and objectives of all following sessions.

The introduction was then followed by an open on how Artificial Intelligence and Computer Vision are impacting our daily life, their uses and applications. The panel was composed by Dr. Fernando Vilariño, Associate CVC director, Alexandra Canet, CVC Communications Manager, CVC PhD students Laura López and Marc Masana, and last but not least, Sigrid Vila, Bruno Moya and Oriol Baeza. The last three are High School students who have spent a research stay at CVC as part of their Research School Projects.  In addition, all members of the public could contribute and thus detect the different challenges that this technology must face in their different areas of expertise.

ExperimentAI is a recurrent activity that will take place on a weekly basis from the 7th of November until the 20th of Februrary 2019 at the Library Living Lab. We will be presenting, every Wednesday, new experiences, prototypes and activities to understand the impact of AI and Computer Vision in our future and current society.

All information, calendar and registrations here: ExperimentAI website

CVC celebrated this year’s Annual Catalan Meeting on Computer Vision (ACMCV2018) that took place on the 20th of September. This event is annually organized by the Master in Computer Vision coordinators of the Catalan universities UAB, UOC, UPC and UPF. The aims of this meeting are to strengthen the Catalan academic and industrial computer vision network, to disseminate the most relevant works and to allow students from the Master in Computer Vision meet with members of the Catalan CV community.

This year’s edition counted, as always, with the presentation of the final master thesis from the Master in Computer Vision, a poster session and two keynote lectures carried out by Guillem Alenyà, from the Institute of Robotics and Industrial Informatics (IRI), who talked about the project CLOTHILDE and Marco Pedersoli from the Superior Technology School of Montreal (ETS Montreal), whose talk was about the evolution of his research during the last ten years.

The program and more details about the event can all be found at its website: http://acmcv.cat/