Be kind rewind

Usually, here I post stories about events I attend in relation to my work as a color scientist, mostly conferences. Obviously many things have happened in the past 14 months, conferences were still happening but they had to adapt to this new moving environment.

Leaving Paris in October 2019 and the last on earth Color Imaging Conference I had no idea of the parallel world we will then all enter.

The startup as a spacecraft

Back in Montreal the startup IRYStec I joined in 2017 just enter an asteroid belt. I also thought of the bumpy road image but flying in space with part of your ship falling apart is more accurate and I just finished watching the Mandalorian last week.

After a serious wandering of almost 3 months, losing crew members that luckily found immediate refuge in bigger spacecraft or planets, visiting various enterprises, we unexpectedly got acquired after the list of potential new owners was shrinking and the tank of our spacecraft getting emptier than ever.

Early March 2020 we joined the people of FAURECIA that gave us a big breath of air. Looking back and observing how this new entity acquired us and others, who were and are our new colleagues around the globe I sometimes had the vision of the city of thousand planets.

The pandemic as a journey in space

Everything is happening online nowadays, remote. I could witness as anybody else the conferences canceling their events one after the others but also re-inventing themselves. Maybe the rise of online courses has prepared us for that situation.

Many challenges for conferences, how to not turn into a series of webinars, how to keep people joining the event, how to maintain the social aspect of it, how to make connections for future works. One of the motivations for which I try to go to conferences is to meet IRL my peers, we all work alone in our office or department throughout the year and that moment is the moment where you can exchange faster and more naturally.

Archiving 2020

The Archiving had to switch to an online version of the event in just a few weeks. I really like this event for which I’m doing article reviews sometimes and I think its first online version went well.

Color Imaging 2020

It was supposed to take place in Japan, but instead, it did happen online everywhere. Being part of the committee did show me the challenge of spreading sessions over many time zones, nobody wants to give a talk at 3 am.

A bunch of interesting talks, again good to feel that the projects you are involved in are fitting with the topics discussed in that conference, that you and your team are not disconnected. I’m talking here about the perceptual display topic. The keynote Why are there Colors in the Ocean? given by Derya Akkaynak was particularly enlightening, changing my usual air referential to the underwater world. If you get the physics right you may not need to compensate by neural networks.

But more than the official conference technical program it’s the side aspect I was curious about. The coffee breaks, the poster sessions, all these moments around the scheduled talks. Both for Archiving and CIC, digital rooms have been created for these occasions “à la zoom” where attendees could meet, talk and see each other’s faces. And on a few occasions, it made it easier to talk to a keynote speaker or a person you knew only by name from his/her publications. I guess we all getting used - not for too long, I hope - to that way of interacting with others. What I also heard is some people have been able to join those events because they were cheaper to attend, indeed no need for budget travel approval, just conference fees.

Electronic Imaging 2021

The Electronic Imaging (EI) conference just finished a few hours ago. As for the conferences above the sessions have been recorded, making it possible for the attendees to watch the presentations later.

Because those events happen online, there are happening 24h/24h… Their schedules have been rearranged, spread over many more days and the sessions made a bit shorter, starting with a good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, sometimes happening on two different days at the same time, the future in your living room, kitchen or home office. Formal training for space and time travel.

The EI symposium has many conferences happening in parallel. Very good for browsing between topics where I had the impression sometimes that CNN was a mandatory term in many presented works. At least people understand what they are doing. Also interesting to see how different fields meet at some point, how people are enthusiastic about their field of research and their community.

The term event based camera was revealed to me (spoiler alert I know nothing) first in technical sessions, later in a keynote Event based camera system Revealing the Invisible to Machines with Neuromorphic Vision Systems: Technology and Applications Overview given by Luca Verre from PROPHESEE. Super interesting to witness how a new domain of applications can arise when various technologies arrive at some point of maturation.

Destination unknown

Traditionally the conference reveals the last day what will be the location of the next year’s edition. Nowadays it’s only a wish but the dates are chosen.

Despite missing the IRL social contact that conferences can bring, researchers are used to be isolated, at least in the early stage of your career working on your PhD. Not that I remember about this time being always easy, but the fact that you spend so much time on your topic, your research, your model, your equations that social contacts become a luxury during those years. You are locked down in your research bubble which yourself and your experiment.

Don’t get me wrong, social interactions are really important. During my PhD time in Norway, my peers were in Rochester, München, Lausanne… but to have post-docs around and other PhD students in the lab was very helpful, to be able to exchange, share about your ongoing experience, to relate. You can do that online but it’s different.

In a way I feel the world is experiencing what it is to be a PhD student, you build your experimental setup, define the basis of your reasoning, brick after brick, your life depends on it, and then everything is collapsing when someone is serving pangolin soup at the cafeteria… But you can always adapt and always remain critical about your process. The journey is the thing and it doesn’t have to be a straight line.