mer. 30 novembre 2016

I was in Taipei, Taiwan this week to attend the ACCV'16 conference. As previously with IGARSS, I share below my thoughts about the technical program, the venue and a bit of everything related to the meeting.

The venue

ACCV'16 was held in the Taipei International Convention Center, a huge building near the Taipei 101 in the business district. Everything was very well organized with huge projection screens, comfy chairs and a very nice auditorium for the keynote speeches. What's more, the WiFi coverage was excellent and there were lots of places to chill or work quietly.

Technical program

As expected with current Computer Vision conferences, the presentations were mostly dominated by deep learning related contributions. Prof. Malik's keynote was very inspiring and I am amazed to the diversity and quality of the papers written by his team.

My presentation

I presented our work on Semantic Segmentation of Earth Observation Data Using Deep Networks during the poster session on semantic segmentation. I received lots of interesting feedback and comments from many participants and I'm glad that I was able to present there. My only disappointment was that I couldn't see the other posters from the session as I was too busy presenting my own ! Well, I caught up later with the authors.

Taipei

Going from Paris to Taipei is about 13 hours by plane, so be prepared to either sleep or have some entertainment on board. However, once in Taipei, the city offers its share of discoveries. I really recommend visting both memorials - Dr. Sun-Yat Sen's and Chiang Kai-Check's - that are beauties of architectures surrounded by very appealing parks. If you like landscapes, you can either climb up the Elephant Mountain trail (~20 minutes of climbing stairs) to have an awesome view over all Taipei; or you can take the elevator to the Taipei 101 observatory and be on top of the 5th highest tower in the world. Or you can simply wander in the city until you find a temple that you did not visit yet !

Overall, I really enjoyed the city, which is both very modern and traditional in the same time. The night markets are a very nice experience to try with all the stalls for pretty much everything you could want, from electronics to clothes, and - of course - food ! Be sure to check out both the Chiang Kai-check and the Sun Yat-sen memorials. The latter is (a bit) less known, but I found it more typical and liveful.

Category: conference