Last week, I attended the IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium, hosted this year in Dearborn, Michigan. It was nice to run into old colleagues from UCSD, as well as former collaborators from places like Toyota, and researchers from around the world.
I've always enjoyed attending conferences, as they provide a forum for exchanging new ideas and learning about new developments. In our own labs and workplaces, we can get stuck, recycling the same ideas and approaches, trapped in our echo chambers. At a conference, we can learn from each other.
There was a lot of work presented on autonomous driving. Honestly, the topic is not very exciting anymore. Autonomous driving has been done reliably by many groups, and has really transitioned from a research problem into an engineering problem. Now car companies are figuring out how to bring autonomous driving to the market and make profits from it.
In particular, a former collaborator at UCSD, Eshed Ohn-Bar, presented some of his work on hand-tracking in the vehicle, which he's had quite a bit of experience with. He also clued me in to some new work from Pietro Perona's group on object detection. It turns out that Serge Belongie, who sat on my PhD committee, is also a co-author on the paper. Good stuff.
There was a time when I was sick of doing computer vision. I took a break from it for a little while, working with some other sensors, and learning about some other areas. My plan is to get back into some computer vision on a work project later this year.
