5 CVPR’s from CVC this year

As every year, the CVC has been present at the most important gathering in the Computer Vision Science Community, the annual Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference (CVPR). In this edition, CVC researchers have presented a total of 5 papers. The conference was held from the 16th to the 20th of June in Long Beach, California.

The articles presented were the following:

Doodle to Search: Practical Zero-Shot Sketch-based Image Retrieval , by authors Sounak Dey, Pau Riba, Anjan Dutta, Josep Lladós and Yi-Zhe Song.

Learning Metrics from Teachers: Compact Networks for Image Embedding, by authors Lu Yu, Vacit Oguz Yazici, Xialei Liu, Joost van de Weijer, Yongmei Cheng and Arnau Ramisa

Semantically Tied Paired Cycle Consistency for Zero-Shot Sketch-based Image Retrieval, by authors Anjan Dutta and Zeynep Akata

What does it mean to learn in deep networks? And, how does on detect adversarial attacks?, by authors Ciprian A. Corneanu, Meysam Madadi, Sergio Escalera and Aleix M. Martinez.

Good News, Everyone! Context driven entity-aware captioning for news images, by authors Ali Furkan Biten, Lluis Gomez, Marçal Rusiñol and Dimosthenis Karatzas

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Dr. Debora Gil invited speaker at the conference “L’Estadística de les Coses”

CVC researcher, Dr. Debora Gil, took part in this year’s Spring Meeting “L’Estadística de les coses”, organized by Societat Catalana d’Estadística. In this edition, the conference focused on Data Science and the Internet of Things and was held on the 5th of June at ETSAB (Barcelona School of Architecture). Dr. Debora Gil gave the talk “Iot4 … Read more

CVC Open Day for students 2019

Last Friday 31st 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.  

CROMA 2.0 Day at CVC

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 28th 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.

 

Dr. Antonio Lopez and Dr. Sergio Escalera have received the ICREA Academia Award for research excellence

The ICREA Academia 2018 program has recognised the scientific trajectory of two CVC researchers, Dr. Antonio López and Dr. Sergio Escalera. The aim of the ICREA Academia Award is to reward excellence in research among professors in Catalan Universities. A total of 45 researchers have received this distinction, with a five year grant in order … Read more

CVC at MEMEnginy 2019

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.

CVC at Mobile World Congress 2019

The Computer Vision Center presented some of its latest technology at this year’s edition of the Mobile World Congress at the Catalan Pavilion (CS20).

Mobile World Congress (MWC) is the most important mobile event in the world that promotes the sector of the information and communication technologies. This year, this relevant event took place from the 25th to the 28th of February and 109.000 visitors and more than 2.400 companies all over the world attended to Fira de Barcelona in order to show and discover the latest innovations and leading-edge technology.

The Computer Vision Center was one of the 46 Catalan companies and institutions that presented their solutions in a stand within the Catalan Government pavilion, located in the central part of the Congress (Congress Square 20). The CVC had the opportunity to widen horizons presenting its research to a high number of professionals from different businesses worldwide and gaining reputation at a local scale with the visit of different personalities, journalists and politicians, such as the Right Honourable President of the Government of Catalonia, Quim Torra.

CVC presented its research focusing on three demonstrations: a software that predicts people’s personality traits in first-impressions, different tools for image retrieval using text or sketches and BronchoX, a service for lung cancer biopsy. Moreover, the last day of the congress, CVC team presented a demonstration on Autonomous Driving in the front part of the Catalan pavilion in which attendants had to race against the Artificial Intelligence inside our Carla Simulator.

Four days of intense work and networking in which hundreds of visitors came to our stand to discover the technologies and all aspects of CVC’s work.

In the media:

El Punt Avui, 27/02/2019, Innovació multidisciplinària

Vila Web, 25/02/2019: Un centenar d’empreses catalanes es fan un lloc al MWC amb solucions en mobilitat, logística i ciutats intel·ligents

Segre, 27/02/2019, Tecnologia lleidatana a la segona jornada de l’MWC

Regió 7, 25/02/2019: Un centenar d’empreses catalanes es fan un lloc al MWC

Aldia.cat, 25/02/2019: Un centenar d’empreses catalanes es fan un lloc al MWC amb solucions en mobilitat, logística i ciutats intel·ligents

 

 

Have a look at our Mobile World Congress 2019 Moment in Twitter: https://twitter.com/i/moments/1093800699673092097?s=13

CVC people at NeurIPS 2018

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 López invited speaker at the First Forum on Autonomous Vehicles

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 27th 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 at Smart City Expo 2018

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.