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.
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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.
Unleashing Big Data of the Past – Europe builds a Time Machine
The European Commission has chosen Time Machine as one of the six proposals retained for preparing large scale research initiatives to be strategically developed in the next decade. €1 million in funding has been granted for preparing the detailed roadmaps of this initiative that aims at extracting and utilising the Big Data of the past. … Read more
Alliberant el Big Data del passat – Europa construeix una màquina del temps
La Comissió Europea ha triat Time Machine com una de les sis propostes seleccionades per a la preparació d’iniciatives de recerca a gran escala que es desenvoluparan estratègicament en la pròxima dècada. S’ha concedit 1 milió d’euros en finançament per preparar el full de ruta detallat d’aquesta iniciativa, que té com a objectiu extreure i … Read more
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
Dr Maria Vanrell, winner of the CIARP Aurora Pons-Porrata Award 2018
CVC Researcher Dr Maria Vanrell has received the CIARP Aurora Pons-Porrata Award in recognition of her professional trajectory. This international prize is given annually to a living woman in recognition of an outstanding scientific contribution to the field of pattern recognition, data mining and related areas. Dr Maria Vanrell is an Associate Professor of Artificial … Read more
A new symposium claims the importance of Barcelona in Artificial Intelligence
Global experts in Deep Learning will meet in Barcelona on December 20 and 21. Barcelona will host on December 20 and 21 a new symposium on Deep Learning, Deep Learning Barcelona Symposium (DLBCN), one of the driving forces of the current technological revolution around Artificial Intelligence and Computer Vision. The symposium brings together top-level researchers … Read more
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.
