Engineering Professor Helps Head Up Successful 'Frontier' Artificial Intelligence Conference

Courtesy of Khoa Luu

One of the presentations at CVPR 2023

The annual conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2023, in Vancouver, Canada, attracted global attention to various uses of artificial intelligence, drawing over 1,000 attendees from more than 75 countries.

Khoa Luu, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and area chair of the main conference, said, "This is one of the frontier AI conferences. This is why it attracts a lot of tech companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, et cetera," he said. "These companies see emerging technologies and next generation AI products within this conference and attract a lot of research and scientists."

The conference received over 9,000 submissions, with 2,359 papers ultimately accepted for presentation. The U of A had a notable presence at CVPR 2023. Its doctoral students showcased their work at the main conference and in several workshops.

Naga VS Raviteja Chappa, a Ph.D. student, achieved third place at the best paper competition of the ninth International Workshop on Computer Vision in Sports. Xuan-Bac Nguyen, also a Ph.D. student, received the prestigious best reviewer award at the main conference. These students also served as panelists to review other submissions to the main conference.

Luu expressed his commitment to encouraging student participation in conferences.

"I do my best to secure grants and encourage graduate students to attend this conference," Luu said. "I do this so they can learn how to become professional researchers in the future. This conference gives them the opportunity to meet corporate attendees, communicate and interact with professionals in the industry. Our students often just stay in the computer lab creating code during their academic careers. They need to reach out and, you know, see and feel the beautiful insights and desires within the industry. It is more than just coding or being a robot machine. They need to see how things are applied and practiced. They need to learn how to present in a professional way and how to communicate with other people. I think this is a critical skill for a graduate student. They can learn this from the conference, and they must learn that they cannot just stay in the lab."

To facilitate student participation, various grants and sponsorships played a pivotal role. Luu expressed his gratitude to the sponsors, including the U of A, for supporting the students' research and enabling their enriching experiences at CVPR 2023.

Not only did Luu serve as the area chair for the main conference, he also was the co-organizer of the CVPR 2023 Precognition Workshop. He did this in collaboration with Aurora Innovation Inc., Google Research, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Houston and HKUST (Guangzhou).

Luu would like to give special thanks to all those who collaborated and sponsors:

• Travel Grants from U of A: Presentation Travel Grant & International Travel Supplement
• Arkansas Biosciences Institute grant
• NSF RII Track 2: Multi-Scale Integrative Approach to Digital Health: Collaborative Research and Education in Smart Health in West Virginia and Arkansas (WVAR-CRESH)
• NSF Data Science, Data Analytics that are Robust and Trusted (DART)
• Google Initiated Research grant
• MonArk NSF Quantum Foundry
• Department of Geosciences, U of A
• Department of Food Science, U of A
• Department Of Health, Human Performance and Recreation, U of A
• West Virginia University
• Carnegie Mellon University
• Concordia University, Canada

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2024 will be held June 17-21, 2024, at the Seattle Convention Center.