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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. 

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.