Highlights from CVPR 2019

Last week, the Sama team attended the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) conference in Long Beach, one of the largest computer vision conferences in the world.With a heavy focus on research presentations, the conference was well attended by students, academics, industry researchers and professionals working in the field of computer vision and machine learning.We’ve seen explosive growth in the conference since first attending - a strong indication that the field of computer vision is continuing to grow faster than analysts predict. This year, a record 5,160 papers were submitted, 2,451 more than last year. 1,294 papers were accepted, and there were 9,227 registered attendees, a 32.6% increase from 2018.

 For us, this was also a breakthrough conference.

• We released our first open source data set for research and development, in collaboration with Cornell Tech. It was used as part of the Sixth Workshop on Fine-Grained Visual Categorization. You can download it for free on Git Hub.
• We constructed our first ever 20x20 booth, built from scratch to ensure our brand values - trust, quality, scale, and impact - were accurately represented.
• We talked with some of the brightest minds working to address long-standing development challenges in areas like health, agriculture and education at the Computer Vision for Global Challenges dinner hosted by Facebook and Partnership on AI.
• We had countless meetings with prospective employees, customers, and those that want to work with Sama to obtain high-quality training data. They were equally impressed by our technology, training data expertise, and our impact mission.

PHOTO: Douglas Welcome manning the Sama booth, built from recycled and recyclable materials with East African-inspired swag that was impact sourced.From facial recognition to augmented reality, computer vision is changing the way we interact with the world around us. CVPR 2019 was a reflection of that, and the Sama team looks forward to collaborating with the many organizations leading the way.