Gearing up for the LDV Vision Summit
The second LDV Vision Summit is coming up in NYC May 19–20 and I’m excited to be part of the organizing team again. Recent years have seen an surge of startup companies using Computer Vision (Clarifai, Mapillary, Magic Leap, DeepMind, Jetpac) and a burst of interest on the part of established companies (Facebook, Google, Dropbox, Yahoo!) to recruit Computer Vision talent. The time is ripe to create opportunities to bring together the key players – the brilliant students and recent grads, investors, visionaries and practitioners – that fuel this emerging startup scene. The success of the first Vision Summit in the summer of 2014 inspired me to jump back in and put together a program for a bigger, better sequel together with Evan Nisselson of LDV Capital, the main organizer of the event.
A Different Kind of Challenge
We are assembling a world class lineup of speakers, panelists and judges from universities, startup companies, VC firms and media companies around the world. My efforts are focused on Day 1 of the summit, the “Technology Deep Dive,” which includes as a highlight the Entrepreneurial Computer Vision Challenges finalist presentations.
If you’re familiar with the challenges hosted at the major Computer Vision conferences (CVPR, ICCV, ECCV), the ones you’ll see at the LDV Vision Summit have a different, complementary twist. The challenge entries are not strictly analyzed on their quantitative results. You can be as creative as you wish. You can focus solely on your algorithms to solve the challenges or you can combine your code with third party APIs to improve your solution and impress your colleagues, investors and the judges.
Something for Everyone
There’s plenty more to experience at this event even if you don’t take the plunge on one of the challenges. The keynotes and panel discussions will cover the latest trends in augmented/virtual reality, personal/social robotics, internet-scale image recognition, computational photography, biomedical imaging and mapping/satellite imaging. The vibe at the summit is somewhere between a Computer Vision workshop and a technology roundtable at a VC firm. Yes, you’ll hear people talking about ConvNets and fine tuning. You’ll also hear gossip about high profile acquihires. You might hear Evan divulge the secret to making money while you sleep :-)
My favorite part of the summit last year was seeing PhD students wowed by the explosion of opportunities in the field they chose to study. As a result of attending the 2014 summit, one PhD student from Brown got an internship with Clarifai and another from UCF is collaborating on a new app involving clothing recognition.
If this sounds like something you’d like to attend, we’d love to see you at the summit May 19–20 at the SVA Theatre in Manhattan. You can sign up for the newsletter and register for the event at the LDV Vision Summit website.
