Event

Once again, the Computer Vision Center took part in Barcelona’s Maker Faire, which took place on the first weekend of October 2019 at Nau Bostik, an emblematic citizen led cultural center in the neighborhood of La Sagrera (Barcelona). The Faire is visited by more than 5.000 people every year, mainly by families and makers who are enthusiastic of open source projects. The Faire offers diverse perspectives on the great challenges of our progressively complex society. It is a spot that gathers international and local makers, members of industry, universities and research centers who are willing to promote, share and explain their different initiatives and projects.

As in past editions, the CVC showcased some of its Open Source work. The star of the day was our demonstration on apparent personality detection, which uses a thorough analysis of tone, movement and facial microexpressions to predict an apparent personality within a 15-second video. We also presented our Computational Neural Network game, a demonstration aimed to all audiences in which we simplify how a neural network gathers data and takes a decision, which is the basics of how we teach a computer to understand the environment around it by means of cameras.

In the media:

Our participation in this year’s Maker Faire was featured at El País (in Catalan): https://cat.elpais.com/cat/2019/10/04/tecnologia/1570170723_757789.html

The 6^th Annual Catalan Meeting on Computer Vision (ACMCV2019) took place this year on the 17th of September at the Espai Bital, in Barcelona. It is organized every year by the Computer Vision Center and the coordinators of the Master in Computer Vision of several Catalan universities (UAB, UOC, UPC and UPF). The goals of these anual meetings are to strengthen the Catalan academic and industrial Computer Vision network, to highlight the most relevant research results and to allow students from the Master in Computer Vision to meet and interact with members of the Catalan CV community.

This edition, as always, hosted the master thesis presentations of the students of the Master in Computer Vision, a poster session and two keynote lectures carried out by Dr. Gerard Pons-Moll, from the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, with the title ‘Learning from Digital Humans from Images, Videos and Scans’, and Dr. Agata Lapedriza, from the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya whose talk was focused on the evolution of her research in Computer Vision during the last ten years.

Presentation of the Computer Vision Catalan Alliance

Furthermore, we had the kick-off presentation of the Computer Vision Catalan Alliance. This terriotorial alliance aims to promote and foster collaboration within the Computer Vision ecosystem, joining the expertise of  researchers and entrepreneurs in this discipline who are currently based in Catalonia. Dr. Josep Lladós, CVC’s Director, gave a brief introduction and context of the Alliance. Directly after that, there was a panel discussion on the pilars of the Computer Vision Catalan Ecosystem with actors from both industry and Academia: Dr. Elisenda Bou (Vilynx), Mr. Oscar Sala (MWC Barcelona), Dr. Marco Bressan (Satellogic) and Dr. Xavier Giró (IDEAI-UPC). The debate was moderated by Xantal Llavina (TV3 journalist) and closed by the Director of Innovation and Digital Economy of the Catalan Government, Mr. Daniel Marco.

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

Have a look at our ACMCV 2019 Moment in Twitter: https://twitter.com/i/moments/1192056946683187200?s=13

On July 25th, we celebrated CVC’s 14th Workshop on Computer Vision Trends and Challenges (CVCR&D2019), the annual half-day workshop in which PhD students at CVC present their current research, as well as their  future lines of work. This year’s Organising Committee has been formed by Dr. Dena Bazazian and Dr. Jose Antonio Iglesias.

The workshop comprised four different oral sessions with 5 minute presentations dedicated to different Computer Vision areas: (1) Machine Vision, Appearance Analysis and Applications, (2) From Music Scores to Hand Written Texts: Robust Reading and Document Analysis, (3) Autonomous Driving, Action Recognition and Siamese Architectures and (4) Learning to Learn.

Click here to view the CVCR&D 2019 program

Furthermore, an informal poster session was held during both coffee breaks. This Conference, the center’s star internal event, is an excellent chance for PhD students to share their work with the CVC community, giving them the opportunity to receive valuable feedback.

The Computer Vision Center received a most honouring visit from a Catalan ex president, with the opportunity to showcase its technology and prototypes to a set of institutional actors and legislators, key to the regional government of Catalonia.

Last Monday 8^th of July, the Right Honourable Mr. Artur Mas, 129^th President of the Catalan Government, visited the Computer Vision Center, along with a set of distinguished legislators from the regional government. The visit had the aim to know, first-hand, about our research and development activities and counted with the presence of The Honorable Mr. Jordi Puigneró, Conseller of Digital Policies and Public Administration of Catalonia, Mr. Daniel Marco, Director of Innovation and Digital Economy of the Catalan Government, Mrs. Joana Barbany, General Director of Digital Society in the Catalan Government, The Excellent and Magnificent Dr. Margarita Arboix, Rector of the UAB, and the Excellent Dr. Javier Lafuente, UAB’s Vice Rector for Innovation and Strategic Projects.  

During the visit, the President met with Dr. Josep Lladós, CVC Director, Dr. Dimosthenis Karatzas and Dr. Fernando Vilariño, CVC Associate Directors and Dr. Juan José Villanueva, CVC founder and former director. It started with an official greeting and reception followed by an institutional presentation and technology demonstrations by part of several CVC researchers.