And a Conferencing We Will Go

Today was the first day of the conference. So the day was full of talks and walking around the poster sessions. There are a lot of papers being presented and many of them not very strong. CVPR was definitely a lot more rigorous, but I guess that's to be expected since it's a lot harder to get into. I feel that ICPR (this conference) is a good fit for first papers in a set or applied ones because you can talk to people and see what other ideas are out there, but something like CVPR is about publishing a new fangled technique.

That being said, I did have to wade through a lot of chaff that wasn't very useful. I did find a paper from Finland where the guy was working on detecting people from heavy industrial rigs. They have a dataset that will be useful for the CAT work we're doing.

For dinner, we were sheparded on a bus for 1.5 hours to go maybe 5km to the university that was hosting the conference. I did say the traffic was bad :-). There, at the reception, they wined and dined us. More drinks that you could shake a fist at and nibblies to start. Then, for dinner, it was a buffet of varied Turkish food from dolomari (stuff grape leaves) to baked fish with a tomato, chili sauce. Very tasty. After dinner, the band started up. They had 5 singers and an ensemble including a guitar, keyboard, violin and drums. They played everything from showtunes in English and German, to traditional Turkish songs to "I will survive" in Turkish. It was a little surreal. Most of the evening I spent talking with some German's and Russians about everything but work :-)